Lowell's knotty, idiosyncratic theory of history is articulated most succinctly (though not, perhaps, altogether clearly) in poems like "Concord," a sonnet that connects the Indian wars, Henry David Thoreau, and the modern tourist industry, and "Children of Light," which protests the destruction of grain reserves during World War II:

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redman's bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneve's night,
They planted here the Serpent's seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights prove to shock
The Riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter by an empty altar,
And light is where the landless blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain.

This poem adopts the excoriating language 17^th-century Puritanism—of Milton and of the wrathful divines of Massachusetts—and turns it against the soulless modernity Lowell believed they had engendered. With the murder of King Phillip in the Indian wars and of King Charles in the English Civil War, he decided, New England had abandoned the living God, whose signs and presence are apprehensible, in these poems, to Lowell alone. (This Lowell does not speak to Cabots, but only to God, though expressly not the God of his fathers.)