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His home! the Western giant smiles,
And twirls the spotty globe to find it;
This little speck, the British Isles?
'T is but a freckle,—never mind it.
A Good Time going.
But Memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant.
A Good Time going.
You hear that boy laughing?—you think he 's all fun;
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.
The Boys.
Good to the heels the well-worn slipper feels
When the tired player shuffles off the buskin;
A page of Hood may do a fellow good
After a scolding from Carlyle or Ruskin.
How not to settle it.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. i.
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. i.
Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. i.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. vi.
There is that glorious epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the historian,[637:1] in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that [638]other saying of one of the wittiest of men:[638:1] "Good Americans when they die go to Paris."
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. vi.
Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You could n't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. vi.
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. vi.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. vi.
Knowledge and timber should n't be much used till they are seasoned.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. vi.
The hat is the ultimum moriens of respectability.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. viii.
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
On the Seventieth Birthday of Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1889).
[637:1] John Lothrop Motley.
Said Scopas of Thessaly, "We rich men count our felicity and happiness to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things."—Plutarch: On the Love of Wealth.
[638:1] Thomas G. Appleton.
ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 1809- ——.Our Country,—whether bounded by the St. John's and the Sabine, or however otherwise bounded or described, and be the measurements more or less,—still our Country, to be cherished in all our hearts, to be defended by all our hands.
Toast at Faneuil Hall on the Fourth of July, 1845.
A star for every State, and a State for every star.
Address on Boston Common in 1862.
There are no points of the compass on the chart of true patriotism.
Letter to Boston Commercial Club in 1879.
[639]
The poor must be wisely visited and liberally cared for, so that mendicity shall not be tempted into mendacity, nor want exasperated into crime.
Yorktown Oration in 1881.
Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise,—all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free.
Yorktown Oration in 1881.
JAMES ALDRICH. 1810-1856.Her suffering ended with the day,
Yet lived she at its close,
And breathed the long, long night away
In statue-like repose.
A Death-Bed.
But when the sun in all his state
Illumed the eastern skies,
She passed through Glory's morning-gate,
And walked in Paradise.
A Death-Bed.
THEODORE PARKER. 1810-1860.There is what I call the American idea. . . . This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy,—that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God. For shortness' sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.[639:1]
Speech at the N. E. Antislavery Convention, Boston, May 29, 1850.
[639:1] See Daniel Webster, page 532.
[640]
EDMUND H. SEARS. 1810-1876.Calm on the listening ear of night
Come Heaven's melodious strains,
Where wild Judea stretches far
Her silver-mantled plains.
Christmas Song.
It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old.
The Angels' Song.
MARTIN F. TUPPER. 1810-1889.A babe in a house is a well-spring of pleasure.
Of Education.
God, from a beautiful necessity, is Love.
Of Immortality.
EDGAR A. POE. 1811-1849.Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
The Raven.
Whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster.
The Raven.
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
The Raven.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—Nevermore!
The Raven.
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
To Helen.
[641]
WENDELL PHILLIPS. 1811-1884.Revolutions are not made; they come.
Speech, Jan. 28, 1852.
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
Speech, Dec. 21, 1855.
One on God's side is a majority.
Speech, Nov. 1, 1859.
Every man meets his Waterloo at last.
Speech, Nov. 1, 1859.
Revolutions never go backward.
Speech, Feb. 12, 1861.
FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE. 1811- ——.A sacred burden is this life ye bear:
Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly,
Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly.
Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin,
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.
Lines addressed to the Young Gentlemen leaving the Lenox Academy, Mass.
Better trust all, and be deceived,
And weep that trust and that deceiving,
Than doubt one heart, that if believed
Had blessed one's life with true believing.
Faith.
BARTHOLOMEW DOWLING.Ho! stand to your glasses steady!
'T is all we have left to prize.
A cup to the dead already,—
Hurrah for the next that dies![641:1]
Revelry in India.
[641:1] This quatrain appears with variations in several stanzas. "The poem," says Mr. Rossiter Johnson in "Famous Single and Fugitive Poems," "is persistently attributed to Alfred Domett; but in a letter to me, Feb. 6, 1879, he says: 'I did not write that poem, and was never in India in my life. I am as ignorant of the authorship as you can be.'"
[642]
ALFRED DOMETT. 1811- ——.It was the calm and silent night!
Seven hundred years and fifty-three
Had Rome been growing up to might,
And now was queen of land and sea.
No sound was heard of clashing wars,
Peace brooded o'er the hushed domain;
Apollo, Pallas, Jove, and Mars
Held undisturbed their ancient reign
In the solemn midnight,
Centuries ago.
Christmas Hymn.
JULIA A. FLETCHER (NOW MRS. CARNEY).Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.
So the little minutes, humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages of eternity.
Little Things, 1845.
Little deeds of kindness, little words of love,
Help to make earth happy like the heaven above.
Little Things, 1845.
AUSTEN H. LAYARD. —— -1894.I have always believed that success would be the inevitable result if the two services, the army and the navy, had fair play, and if we sent the right man to fill the right place.[642:1]
Speech in Parliament, Jan. 15, 1855.[642:2]
[642:1] See Sydney Smith, page 461.
[642:2] This speech is reported in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. cxxxviii. p. 2077.
[643]
ROBERT BROWNING. 1812-1890.Any nose
May ravage with impunity a rose.
Sordello. Book vi.
That we devote ourselves to God, is seen
In living just as though no God there were.
Paracelsus. Part i.
Be sure that God
Ne'er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart.
Paracelsus. Part i.
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive,—what time, what circuit first,
I ask not; but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time.
Paracelsus. Part i.
Are there not, dear Michal,
Two points in the adventure of the diver,—
One, when a beggar he prepares to plunge;
One, when a prince he rises with his pearl?
Festus, I plunge.
Paracelsus. Part i.
God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
Paracelsus. Part ii.
The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung
To their first fault, and withered in their pride.
Paracelsus. Part iv.
I give the fight up: let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God.
Paracelsus. Part v.
Progress is
The law of life: man is not Man as yet.
Paracelsus. Part v.
Say not "a small event!" Why "small"?
Costs it more pain that this ye call
[644]A "great event" should come to pass
From that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!
Pippa Passes. Introduction.
God 's in his heaven:
All 's right with the world.
Pippa Passes. Part i.
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas,—
Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas.
Pippa Passes. Part ii.
In the morning of the world,
When earth was nigher heaven than now.
Pippa Passes. Part iii.
All service ranks the same with God,—
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first.
Pippa Passes. Part iv.
I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
I trust in God,—the right shall be the right
And other than the wrong, while he endures.
I trust in my own soul, that can perceive
The outward and the inward,—Nature's good
And God's.
A Soul's Tragedy. Act i.
Ever judge of men by their professions. For though the bright moment of promising is but a moment, and cannot be prolonged, yet if sincere in its moment's extravagant
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