John Lowell (June 17, 1743 – May 6, 1802) was an American lawyer, selectman, jurist, delegate to the Congress of the Confederation and federal judge. Known within his family as “The Old Judge,” distinguishing him from the proliferation of Johns, John Lowell is considered to be the patriarch of the Boston Lowells. He, with each of his three wives, established three distinct lines of the Lowell clan that, in turn, propagated celebrated poets, authors, jurists, educators, merchants, bankers, national heroes, activists, innovators and philanthropists. John Lowell, his descendants, and many other well established New England families defined American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Read more about John Lowell: Early Life and Family, Career
Famous quotes containing the words john and/or lowell:
“No such sermons have come to us here out of England, in late years, as those of this preacher,—sermons to kings, and sermons to peasants, and sermons to all intermediate classes. It is in vain that John Bull, or any of his cousins, turns a deaf ear, and pretends not to hear them: nature will not soon be weary of repeating them. There are words less obviously true, more for the ages to hear, perhaps, but none so impossible for this age not to hear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)