Success Quote by James Russell Lowell

Lowell doesn’t merely defend ambition here; he criminalizes timidity. “Not failure” is the mercy clause, the permission slip for risk in a culture that loves to punish embarrassment. The sting lands on “low aim,” a phrase that sounds genteel but operates like a moral accusation: you didn’t just fall short, you chose a small target so you could pretend you never missed. In one tight inversion, he shifts shame away from the botched attempt and onto the pre-emptive compromise.

As a poet working in the long shadow of American self-making, Lowell is also auditing a national temperament. Mid-19th-century America was loud with progress language - abolition, reform, expansion, industry - and equally loud with caution, the instinct to settle for incremental comfort. “Crime” is deliberately overcharged; he’s borrowing the vocabulary of law and sin to insist that under-aspiration isn’t a private quirk but a civic failure. Low aim produces low stakes, which produces a society that never has to test its conscience.

The subtext is tougher than motivational poster wisdom. Lowell isn’t celebrating any aim, just “high” ones, implying a hierarchy of worth. That’s where the line bites: it flatters the reader into imagining they’re capable of nobler goals, then indicts them for choosing convenience. Failure becomes honorable collateral; the real disgrace is strategic mediocrity, the life engineered to avoid looking foolish.