The front page had a dedication, signed by twenty or so lawyers, to a recently deceased judge. The dedication spoke of the judge as a person of 'near perfect justice and insight'. Affection and sorrow came off the yellowing page.
Who was the judge?
What did the judge do?
Who were the lawyers who signed the dedication?
Why did they feel so strongly about the judge?
All lost in the mists of time. No one remembers the judges or the lawyers. At most they are minor entries in Wikipedia. Our greatest triumphs and defeats, our joys and sorrows, all pass and are forgotten:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
3 comments:
The other day, I bought an old 1938 hardback text on economics for 50 cents at a garage sale. Later, I found inside a pamphlet left between its pages. The pamphlet, dated 1939, was the text of a radio speech given by then US AG Frank Murphy, who was appointed to SCOTUS the next year. The topic was the importance of civil liberties and and the conflict of freedom versus security. If you didn't see the date, you would have thought it was about 9/11. I searched online about it, and only after I input verbatim several lines of text I thought might be unique did I get anything at all. I got one hit, deep inside what appears to be an academic's draft collection of various works. How soon we lose hold of the past.
~ Anne-Marie Clark
Hello Morton - You forgot to give credit where credit was due by thanking Percy Shelley, the greatest lyrical poet in our language.
Indeed, I did not mention Shelley -- because I thought it was obvious! But you are right!!!! So yes to our greatest lyric poet
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