“But as the most mutilated torsoes of the perfections of antiquity are not unworthy the student’s attention, neither are the most bungling modern incompletenessess: for both are torsoes; one of perished perfections in the past; the other, by anticipation, of yet unfulfilled perfections in the future.”

(Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Book XXVI, “A Walk and a Foreign Portrait,” p. 350.)