“..if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this…entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. … What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely-mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.”

-Nathaniel Hawthorne [US author (1804 – 1864)] – The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Chapt. 2, “The First Customer”