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James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). Loving and Singing. David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays

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James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). Loving and Singing. David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record David J. Brewer, et al., eds.  The World’s Best Essays.  1900. Loving and Singing
By James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) From the Pioneer of 1843.

AS love is the highest and holiest of all feelings, so those songs are best in which love is the essence. All poetry must rest on love for a foundation, or it will only last so long as the bad passions it appeals to, and which it is the end of true poesy to root out. If there be not in it a love of man, there must at least be a love of nature, which lies next below it, and which, as is the nature of all beauty, will lead its convert upward to that nobler and wider sympathy. True poetry is but the perfect reflex of true knowledge, and true knowledge is spiritual knowledge, which comes only of love, and which, when it has solved the mystery of one, even the smallest effluence of the eternal beauty, which surrounds us like an atmosphere, becomes a clew leading to the heart of the seeming labyrinth. All our sympathies lie in such close neighborhood, that when music is drawn from one string, all the rest vibrate in sweet accord. As in the womb the brain of the child changes, with a steady rise, through a likeness to that of one animal and another, till it is perfected in that of man, the highest animal, so in this life, which is but as a womb wherein we are shaping to be born in the next, we are led upward from love to love till we arrive at the love of God, which is the highest love. Many things unseal the springs of tenderness in us ere the full glory of our nature gushes forth to the one benign spirit which interprets for us all mystery, and is the key to unlock all the most secret shrines of beauty. Woman was given us to love chiefly to this end, that the sereneness and strength which the soul wins from that full sympathy with one, might teach it the more divine excellence of a sympathy with all, and that it was man’s heart only which God shaped in his own image, which it can only rightly emblem in an all-surrounding love. Therefore, we put first those songs which tell of love, since we see in them not an outpouring of selfish and solitary passion, but an indication of that beautiful instinct which prompts the heart of every man to turn toward its fellows with a smile, and to recognize its master even in the disguise of clay; and we confess that the sight of the rudest and simplest love verses in the corner of a village newspaper oftener brings tears of delight into our eyes than awakens a sense of the ludicrous….

1   The songs of our great poets are unspeakably precious. In them find vent those irrepressible utterances of homely fireside humanity, inconsistent with the loftier aim and self-forgetting enthusiasm of a great poem, which preserve the finer and purer sensibilities from wilting and withering under the black frost of ambition. The faint records of flitting impulses, we light upon them sometimes imbedded round the bases of the basaltic columns of the epic or the drama, like heedless insects or tender ferns which had fallen in while those gigantic crystals were slowly shaping themselves in the molten entrails of the soul all aglow with the hidden fires of inspiration, or like the tracks of birds from far-off climes, which had lighted upon the ductile mass ere it had hardened into eternal rock. They make the lives of the masters of the lyre encouragements and helps to us, by teaching us humbly to appreciate and sympathize with, as men, those whom we should else almost have worshiped as beings of a higher order. In Shakespeare’s dramas we watch with awe the struggles and triumphs and defeats, which seem almost triumphs, of his unmatched soul;—in his songs we can yet feel the beating of a simple, warm heart, the mate of which can be found under the first homespun frock you meet on the highroad. He who, instead of carefully plucking the fruit from the tree of knowledge, as others are fain to, shook down whole showers of leaves and twigs and fruit at once; who tossed down systems of morality and philosophy by the handful; who wooed nature as a superior, and who carpeted the very earth beneath the delicate feet of his fancy with such flowers of poesy as bloom but once in a hundred years,—this vast and divine genius in his songs and his unequaled sonnets (which are but epic songs, songs written, as it were, for an organ or rather ocean accompaniment), shows all the humbleness, and wavering, and self-distrust, with which the weakness of the flesh tempers souls of the boldest aspiration and most unshaken self-help, as if to remind them gently of that brotherhood to assert and dignify whose claims they were sent forth as apostles.

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