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Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

James Russell Lowell

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James Russell Lowell
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: February 22
Died: 1891
Died: August 12
Diplomat
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Eye
Wake
Heart
Clouds
Sorrow
Whither
Tears
Fled
Leave
Forgets
Eyes
Ache
Heaven
Shed
Forget
Weather

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Over our manhood bend the skies Against our fallen and traitor lives The great winds utter prophecies With our faint hearts the mountain strives, Its arms outstretched, the druid wood Waits with its benedicite And to our age’s drowsy blood Still shouts the inspiring sea.
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All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.
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Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.
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The future works out great men's destinies The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.
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Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.
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That pernicious sentiment, Our country, right or wrong.
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In the scale of the destinies, brawn will never weigh so mach as brain.
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In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
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An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.
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It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.
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In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become science.
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Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
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Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?
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Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine.
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There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.
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They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.
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To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.
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Sentiment is intellectualized emotion emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
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The pine is the mother of legends.
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Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.
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