A Lantern On The Stern

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!  But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834), English poet, critic and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets, Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T. Coleridge 1821-1834 by Henry N. Coleridge (1835), 18 December 1831