James Russell Lowell Quotes on Nature
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Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold.
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From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature's text; And embryo Good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the Evil in its nature.
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Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.
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The birch, most shy and lady-like of trees, Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves.
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The snow had begun in the gloaming, And busily all the night Had been heaping field and highway With a silence deep and white.
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Along A River-Side, I Know Not Where, I walked one night in mystery of dream; A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair, To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.
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There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
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The Maple puts her corals on in May, While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling, To be in tune with what the robins sing.
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To win the secret of a weed's plain heart.
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Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.
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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: Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, grasping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.
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Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how; Everything is happy now, Everything is upward striving; 'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,- 'Tis the natural way of living: Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake; And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, The heart forgets its sorrow and ache; The soul partakes the season's youth, And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth, Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.
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God makes sech nights, all white an' still, Fur'z you can look or listen, Moonshine an' snow on field an' hill, All silence an' all glisten.
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Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.