Quest for 154

154, number of sonnets written by William Shakespeare.

My speculation is that a survey of opinions, from historians, will show that Abraham Lincoln was the greatest of the 45 Presidents of the USA. Well, perhaps it could be George Washington. Either way, Lincoln will most likely be in the top two.

It's quite remarkable, considering that neither of these two men had much formal education. Lincoln in particular, had essentially no formal education at all. And yet, most will agree that his intellect and his eloquence to communicate clearly his thought were two of the characteristics that helped him stand out during his time, as well as throughout the history of North America, and perhaps even the world.

While lacking formal education, Lincoln liked to say that the Bible and Shakespeare were his teachers. Well, I guess that figures. If you have the intellectual capacity to digest these two, you could probably understand most things in human life.

Winston Churchill, perhaps the only man of the twentieth century that could match Lincoln's greatness, also had been a student of Shakespeare's works, actually committing to memory MacBeth.

Well, I am no Churchill, nor Lincoln, but perhaps I could try to play catch up a bit here.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decrease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substatial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak'st waste in niggardling:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Unfortunately, I do not really understand what this sonnet is about.