"Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come"
About this Quote
Cheer, in Lowell's hands, isn't a mood so much as a discipline: a deliberate refusal to let imagined disaster steal the oxygen from actual life. The line pivots on a sly paradox. The "misfortunes hardest to bear" are not the ones that bruise you in public, but the private catastrophes you rehearse in your head, again and again, until they feel inevitable. Lowell offers comfort without sentimentality. He doesn't deny pain; he indicts a particular kind of pain-making machine: the mind's talent for turning uncertainty into a steady drip of dread.
The intent is quietly corrective. "Let us be of good cheer" reads like a communal instruction, an appeal to civic temperament as much as individual coping. That matters for Lowell, a 19th-century American poet and public moralist writing in an era saturated with national anxiety: slavery's violence, political fracture, war on the horizon, the speed-up of modern life. In that atmosphere, the imagination could become a factory for foregone conclusions. His antidote isn't naive optimism; it's probabilistic humility. Most of what we fear never happens, and the cost of paying for it in advance is real.
Subtext: worrying masquerades as vigilance, but often functions as self-administered punishment. Lowell's wit is gentle but pointed; he flatters the reader with "good cheer" while slipping in the accusation that we're suffering from phantoms. It's a moral nudge dressed as a toast, insisting that resilience begins by refusing to catastrophize.
The intent is quietly corrective. "Let us be of good cheer" reads like a communal instruction, an appeal to civic temperament as much as individual coping. That matters for Lowell, a 19th-century American poet and public moralist writing in an era saturated with national anxiety: slavery's violence, political fracture, war on the horizon, the speed-up of modern life. In that atmosphere, the imagination could become a factory for foregone conclusions. His antidote isn't naive optimism; it's probabilistic humility. Most of what we fear never happens, and the cost of paying for it in advance is real.
Subtext: worrying masquerades as vigilance, but often functions as self-administered punishment. Lowell's wit is gentle but pointed; he flatters the reader with "good cheer" while slipping in the accusation that we're suffering from phantoms. It's a moral nudge dressed as a toast, insisting that resilience begins by refusing to catastrophize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Optimism |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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