Once Hector Stuart in his tersest mood Took up his pencil. “By the holy rood!” He cried, “I’ll write an epigram.” He did— Nay, by the holy mile his pencil slid.
Where this text comes from
First published in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume V (1911). This date is uncertain. Taken from Volume V of the Neale collected edition (copyright 1911). That is the printing this text comes from, not the poem's first appearance: the volume's own preface states that most of its verses are republished from newspapers and periodicals of the Pacific Coast, and which of them printed this poem first has not been established here. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-20.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/ambrose-bierce_poetry, black-beetles-in-amber.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (11)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L4.
Cite this poem
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?).
“An Epigrammatist.” First published in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume V (1911).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/ambrose-bierce/an-epigrammatist/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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