Achieving immortality

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Shakespeare's Sonnet LV  

LET us consider, too how differently young and old are affected by the words of some Classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply ; which he gets by heart, and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, success- fully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. 

Cardinal Newman 

But wise words taught in numbers for to run
Recorded by the Muses, live for aye ;
Ne may with storming showers be washt away,
Ne bitter-breathing winds with harmful blast
Nor age, nor envy, shall them ever waste.

Edmund Spenser

These come from Words and days : a table-book of prose and verse by Bowyer Nichols (1895) which I bought when 19 secondhand and recently decided I ought to reread. I tried reading Spenser's Fairy Queen when I was 12, which was the same age as Alexander Pope and I bet younger than our co-religionist the Cambridge English graduate Andy Burnham. Yet he is Prime Minister and Pope lisped in numbers.