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John Greenleaf Whittier Quotes

d. 1892 United States

John Greenleaf Whittier (17 December 1807 – 7 September 1892) was an American Quaker poet and abolitionist.

United States
19th-century poets
Poets

Also known as: Whittier, John Greenleaf

Random John Greenleaf Whittier quote

93 quotes

What! mothers from their children riven!
What! God's own image bought and sold!
AMERICANS to market driven,
And bartered as the brute for gold!

Our fellow-countrymen in chains!
Slaves—in a land of light and law!
Slaves—crouching on the very plains
Where rolled the storm of Freedom's war!

And let these altars, wreathed with flowers
And piled with fruits, awake again
Thanksgivings for the golden hours,
The early and the latter rain!

Beauty for Ashes, and oil of joy!

What pictures to the taster rise,
Of Dervish or of Almeh dances!
Of Eblis, or of Paradise,
Set all aglow with Houri glances!

The Haschish (1854)

Could'st thou boast, O child of weakness!
O'er the sons of wrong and strife,
Were their strong temptations planted
In thy path of life?

Blow, bugles of battle, the marches of peace;
East, west, north, and south let the long quarrel cease;
Sing the song of great joy that the angels began,
Sing the glory to God and of good-will to man!

But let the good old corn adorn
The hills our fathers trod;
Still let us, for his golden corn,
Send up our thanks to God!

The Corn-Song: Quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

Beauty seen is never lost.

Happy he whose inward ear
Angel comfortings can hear,
O'er the rabble's laughter;
And, while Hatred's fagots burn,
Glimpses through the smoke discern
Of the good hereafter.

Maud Muller, on a summer's day,
Raked the meadows sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.

Maud Muller (1856)

Their right, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dread arbitrament of war. Their bones whiten every stricken field of the Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine and nakedness of Valley Forge, and the pestilential horrors of the old Jersey prison ship.

Making their lives a prayer.

Through this dark and stormy night
Faith beholds a feeble light
Up the blackness streaking;
Knowing God's own time is best,
In a patient hope I rest
For the full day-breaking!

When earth as if on evil dreams
Looks back upon her wars,
And the white light of Christ outstreams
From the red disc of Mars,
His fame, who led the stormy van
Of battle, well may cease;
But never that which crowns the man
Whose victory was peace.

Sweet promptings unto kindest deeds
Were in her very look;
We read her face, as one who reads
A true and holy book.

God blesses still the generous thought,
And still the fitting word He speeds,
And Truth, at His requiring taught,
He quickens into deeds.

…The low green tent
Whose curtain never outward swings.

Weary lawyers with endless tongues.

Maud Muller (1856)

From purest wells of English undefiled
None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child,
Who in the language of their farm field spoke
The wit and wisdom of New England folk.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Greenleaf Whittier (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.