“Let the thick curtain fall;
I better know than all
How little I have gained,
How vast the unattained.”

—  John Greenleaf Whittier

My Triumph, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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John Greenleaf Whittier photo
John Greenleaf Whittier 47
American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slave… 1807–1892

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