Epigrams must be curt, nor seem
Tail-pieces to a poet’s dream.
If they should anywhere be found
Serious, or musical in sound
Turn into prose the two worst pages
And you will rank among the sages.
“So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson