James Russell Lowell - A Fable for Critics (1848)

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There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

James Russell Lowell
A reading-machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.

James Russell Lowell
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise,
Which is seen through at once, if love give man eyes.

James Russell Lowell
And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak,
Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,
Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.

James Russell Lowell
Nature fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can't write, can surely review.

James Russell Lowell
There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on;
Whose prose is grand verse while his verse the Lord knows
Is some of it pr— No, 't is not even prose!

James Russell Lowell
For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd
He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.

James Russell Lowell
There's nothing we read of in torture's inventions
Like a well-meaning dunce with the best of intentions.

James Russell Lowell
In creating, the only hard thing's to begin;
A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak,
If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke.

James Russell Lowell
Most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.

James Russell Lowell
He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing His African children with slavery, Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the devil's own pillion, Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, Approaches the heart through the door of the toes.

James Russell Lowell