Poems of James Russell Lowell: With biographical sketch by Nathan Haskell DoleLowell, James Russell
General
Poems of James Russell Lowell: With biographical sketch by Nathan Haskell Dole
Lowell, James Russell
American poetry
Before one he trails a hat and feather, or
a bare feather without a hat; before another, a Presidential
chair, or a tidewaiter's stool, or a pulpit in the city, no
matter what. To us, dangling there over our heads, they seem
junkets dropped out of the seventh heaven, sops dipped in
nectar, but, once in our mouths, they are all one, bits of
fuzzy cotton.
This, however, by the way. It is time now _revocare gradum_.
While so many miracles of this sort, vouched by
eyewitnesses, have encouraged the arms of Papists, not to
speak of Echetlæus at Marathon and those _Dioscuri_ (whom we
must conclude imps of the pit) who sundry times captained
the pagan Roman soldiery, it is strange that our first
American crusade was not in some such wise also signalized.
Yet it is said that the Lord hath manifestly prospered our
armies. This opens the question, whether, when our hands are
strengthened to make great slaughter of our enemies, it be
absolutely and demonstratively certain that this might is
added to us from above, or whether some Potentate from an
opposite quarter may not have a finger in it, as there are
few pies into which his meddling digits are not thrust.
Would the Sanctifier and Setter-apart of the seventh day
have assisted in a victory gained on the Sabbath, as was one
in the late war? Or has that day become less an object of
his especial care since the year 1697, when so manifest a
providence occurred to Mr. William Trowbridge, in answer to
whose prayers, when he and all on shipboard with him were
starving, a dolphin was sent daily, "which was enough to
serve 'em; only on _Saturdays_ they still catched a couple,
and on the _Lord's Days_ they could catch none at all"?
Haply they might have been permitted, by way of
mortification, to take some few sculpins (those banes of the
salt-water angler), which unseemly fish would, moreover,
have conveyed to them a symbolical reproof for their breach
of the day, being known in the rude dialect of our mariners
as _Cape Cod Clergymen_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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