Life & Wisdom Quote by William Shenstone

Shenstone is making a sly, almost sales-pitch claim about how language survives: not by argument, not even by holiness, but by sound. He’s writing in an 18th-century moment that prized “taste,” polish, and the ear’s authority - a culture where reading was often performed aloud and poetry was expected to behave like song even on the page. In that world, “musical” isn’t a vague compliment; it’s a technology of memory.

The intent is partly prescriptive. Shenstone isn’t just observing that we remember catchy lines; he’s nudging writers toward cadence as a craft priority. The sentence performs its own thesis: “lines,” “period,” “texts” march in a neat little triad, moving from poetry to prose to Scripture as if to say, even your most serious, sacred language is subject to the same sensory law.

The subtext is quietly provocative: Scripture’s stickiness owes less to divine content than to human cognition. That’s not atheism, but it is a demystification. Shenstone flirts with the idea that belief piggybacks on meter, that what feels true often arrives via what sounds inevitable. Think of how a well-turned phrase becomes an internal soundtrack - quoted not because we’ve re-judged it, but because its rhythm keeps replaying.

What works here is the hierarchy he smuggles in. Meaning matters, but musicality decides what gets carried forward. Shenstone anticipates modern insights about mnemonics and “earworms,” while keeping the poet’s vanity intact: history remembers the music-makers.