James Russell Lowell

The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me.

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

That best academy, a mother's knee.

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

AND what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten.

'T is heaven alone that is given away; 'T is only God may be had for the asking.

He gives us the very quintessence of perception,-the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from the memory.

In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.

The better part of every man's education is that which he gives himself.

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

The child is not mine as the first was,_x000D_ I cannot sing it to rest,_x000D_ I cannot lift it up fatherly_x000D_ And bliss it upon my breast;_x000D_ Yet it lies in my little one's cradle_x000D_ And sits in my little one's chair,_x000D_ And the light of the heaven she's gone to_x000D_ Transfigures its golden hair.

It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.

They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.

To me it seems not unreasonable to find a re-enforcement of optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the modern theory that man has mounted to what he is from the lowest step of potentiality, through toilsome grades of ever-expanding existence, even thought it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly dark or dusty, with loop-holes at long intervals only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided view.

Take winter as you find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow; with no nonsense in him, which is a great comfort in the long-run.

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity.

Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet. Lessen like sound of friends departing feet; And death is beautiful as feet of friend. Coming with welcome at our journey's end.