This is the sort of barbaric poetry that man in his natural and original
state might be supposed to utter. It lacks the nice logic and fine
polish of Greek culture; indeed its grammar is somewhat confused. But
there is a higher logic than the logic of grammar, namely the logic of
life and suffering. The man who wrote this passage had put a year of
his existence into every phrase; and that is why it happens that we can
find here more phrases quoted by everybody than we can even in the best
passage of similar length in Shak{e}spe{a}re or any other modern writer.
We see in proverbs how by the power of simplicity an enormous amount of
thought can be packed into a single line. Some of these have taken
thousands of years to grow; and because so much time is required in the
making of them, our facile modern writers never produce any.
Their fleeting epigrams appear to be spurious coin the moment they are
placed side by side with Franklin's epigrams, for instance.
Franklin worked his proverbs into the vacant spaces in his almanac
during a period of twenty-five years, and then collected all those
proverbs into a short paper entitled, "The Way to Wealth.
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