It’s Official

The soul, aspiring, pants its source to mount,
As streams meander level with their fount.

That’s Robert Montgomery, in “The Omnipresence of the Deity.” Thomas Macaulay writes:

We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude the world. In the first place, no stream meanders, or can possibly meander level with its fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with their founts, no two motions can be less like each other than that of meandering level and that of mounting upwards.

“Those who write clearly have readers,” wrote Camus. “Those who write obscurely have commentators.”