A great, a homogeneous, and yet an active people, having strength and security in its political institutions, may look forward to a career of glory.  It may, without offense, seek to render its life memorable in the annals of the human race.

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=_James Russell Lowell, 1810-._= (Manual, pp. 503, 520.)

From “Among my Books.”

=_217._= NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO.

I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight.  An entire ship’s company of Columbuses is what the world never saw.  It is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry is apt to cram his traveling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or texture.  But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had, indeed, no revolutionary ideas of universal liberty; but yet, what answered the purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and English character by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of natural right.  They were not in advance of their age, as it is called, for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.

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=_218._= From an “Essay on Dryden.”

I do not think he added a single word to the language, unless, as I suspect, he first used magnetism in its present sense of moral attraction.  What he did in his best writing was, to use the English as if it were a spoken, and not merely an inkhorn language; as if it were his own to do what he pleased with it, as if it need not be ashamed of itself.  In this respect, his service to our prose was greater than any other man has ever rendered.  He says he formed his style upon Tillotson’s (Bossuet on the other hand, formed his upon Corneille’s); but I rather think he got it at Will’s, for its greatest charm is, that it has the various freedom of talk.  In verse, he has a pomp which, excellent in itself, became pompousness in his imitators.  But he had nothing of Milton’s ear for various rhythm and interwoven harmony.  He knew how to give new modulation, sweetness, and force to the pentameter; but in what used to be called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think he generally failed.

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From “My Study Windows.”

=_219._= LOVE OF BIRDS AND SQUIRRELS.