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
"Think of it: for three dollars a year I buy a season-ticket
to this great Globe Theatre, for which God would write the
dramas (only that we like farces, spectacles, and the
tragedies of Apollyon better), whose scene-shifter is Time,
and whose curtain is rung down by Death.
"Such thoughts will occur to me sometimes as I am tearing
off the wrapper of my newspaper. Then suddenly that
otherwise too often vacant sheet becomes invested for me
with a strange kind of awe. Look! deaths and marriages,
notices of inventions, discoveries, and books, lists of
promotions, of killed, wounded, and missing, news of fires,
accidents, of sudden wealth and as sudden poverty;--I hold
in my hand the ends of myriad invisible electric conductors,
along which tremble the joys, sorrows, wrongs, triumphs,
hopes, and despairs of as many men and women everywhere. So
that upon that mood of mind which seems to isolate me from
mankind as a spectator of their puppet-pranks, another
supervenes, in which I feel that I, too, unknown and unheard
of, am yet of some import to my fellows. For, through my
newspaper here, do not families take pains to send me, an
entire stranger, news of a death among them? Are not here
two who would have me know of their marriage? And, strangest
of all, is not this singular person anxious to have me
informed that he has received a fresh supply of Dimitry
Bruisgins? But to none of us does the President continue
miraculous (even if for a moment discerned as such). We
glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to Orion and
the Pleiades. The wonder wears off, and to-morrow this
sheet, in which a vision was let down to me from Heaven,
shall be the wrappage to a bar of soap or the platter for a
beggar's broken victuals."--H. W.]
No. VII.
A LETTER
FROM A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN ANSWER TO SUTTIN QUESTIONS
PROPOSED BY MR. HOSEA BIGLOW, ENCLOSED IN A NOTE FROM MR. BIGLOW TO S.
H. GAY, ESQ., EDITOR OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-SLAVERY STANDARD.
[Curiosity may be said to be the quality which pre-eminently
distinguishes and segregates man from the lower animals. As
we trace the scale of animated nature downward, we find this
faculty (as it may truly be called) of the mind diminished
in the savage, and quite extinct in the brute. The first
object which civilized man proposes to himself I take to be
the finding out whatsoever he can concerning his neighbors.
_Nihil humanum a me alienum puto_; I am curious about even
John Smith. The desire next in strength to this (an opposite
pole, indeed, of the same magnet) is that of communicating
the unintelligence we have carefully picked up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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