comments (7)

  • This reads so much like an urban legend, that I had to poke around a bit. It appears that it was a piece of fiction written by a Williston Fisk for Harper's Weekly in 1898, and has been given various backstories as time went on.

    technothrasher

  • My favorite Iranian poet, via an Irishman…

      XCIX
      Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire
      To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
      Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
      Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
    
    https://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html

    chasil

  • This were the writing skills of a random dude who was stuck in an asylum. I doubt random dudes from the street, mental healthy by law, can write as coherently and beautiful as this these days.

    LucifersCat

  • I found the piece quite lovely. Proof that clickbait titles existed long before the Internet.

    cf100clunk

  • >"Most Beautiful Will Ever Made"

    Not sure about "most" part but beautiful it absolutely is.

    FpUser

  • here's a poem by ryokan expressing a similar sentiment

    My legacy—What will it be?

    Flowers in spring,

    The cuckoo in summer,

    And the crimson maples

    Of autumn...

    pasquinelli

  • >I, Charles Lounsberry, being of sound and disposing mind and memory...

    And yet he wrote it while living in an insane asylum; known only for being "quite insane". The exact opposite of having a sound mind.

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/disposing_mind_and_memory

    1970-01-01