The morose one refuses to smile even when he has just had his teeth cleaned.
Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?
The harp is an insipid instrument--no good for dancing, feasting, or marching, only for sitting primly in a parlor or on a cloud.
Outside literature, high-flown sentiments are merely exasperating.
After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy.
Fame now wears the halo that once crowned holiness.