James Lowell

Ez to my princerples, I glory In hevin' nothin' o' the sort.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

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

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.

Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays.

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.