Christmas Bells

Christmas Bells Quotes and Analysis

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; / The Wrong shall fail, / The Right prevail"

Speaker

In these lines Longfellow suggests that God is on the side of the Union and that He ultimately has a plan for the suffering nation. He will not allow the evils represented by slavery and Southern aggression to hold sway; rather, he will make sure that what is good and moral will eventually triumph. The religious nature of the poem is clear also in his statement that the bells are ringing out in "Christendom," which is the North, and in his evocation of hell in his description of the cannons—"black, accursed mouth."