The New Hampshire girls who came to Lowell were descendants of the sturdy backwoodsmen who settled that State scarcely a hundred y...ears before.... They were earnest and capable; ready to undertake anything that was worth doing. My dreamy, indolent nature was shamed into activity among them. They gave me a larger, firmer ideal of womanhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme,... He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders, But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders, The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
President Lowell of Harvard appealed to students 'to prepare themselves for such services as the Governor may call upon them to re...nder.' Dean Greenough organized an 'emergency committee,' and Coach Fisher was reported by the press as having declared, 'To hell with football if men are needed.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From the foundation of a wooden observatory ... we could see Monadnock, in simple grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thou...sand feet higher, still the "far blue mountain," though with an altered profile. The first day the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like looking into the sky again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aerial Polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees and hear the lowing of kine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples of the gods... which may once have stood on the banks of this river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. The murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more Lowell and Manchester are on the trail of the Indian.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through which we had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of a race of hunter...s and warriors.... Pawtucket and Wamesit, where the Indians, where the Indians resorted in the fishing season, are now Lowell, the city of spindles and Manchester of America, which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. Even we youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village of Chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was its obscure north district only, and the giant weaver was not yet fairly born. So old are we; so young is it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Salmon, shad, and alewives were formerly abundant here, and taken in weirs by the Indians ... until the dam and afterward the cana...l at Billerica, and the factories at Lowell, put an end to their migrations hitherward; though it is thought that a few more enterprising shad may still occasionally be seen in this part of the river.... Perchance, after a few thousands of years, if the fishes will be patient, and pass their summers elsewhere meanwhile, nature will have leveled the Billerica dam, and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men's necessities, while elsewhere... she was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim's shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This observatory was a building of considerable size, erected by the students of Williamstown College, whose buildings might be se...en by daylight gleaming far down in the valley. It would be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain, as good at least as one well-endowed professorship. It were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mountain as in more classical shades. Some will remember, no doubt, not only that they went to the college, but that they went to the mountain. Every visit to its summit would, as it were, generalize the particular information gained below, and subject it to more catholic tests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »