"The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels."

These two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Snow-Flakes, published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Much of the news chatter this week has been about Sarah Palin's flubbing of the history of Revere's famous ride in April 1775. Revere was on a late-night, clandestine mission to alert American revolutionaries of an impending British attack. Palin's incorrect version had Revere loudly ringing a bell and shooting a gun on horseback as a warning to the British to back off.