And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"

        ---Rudyard Kipling

"The Conundrum of the Workshops," published 1890, full text on the web at the Kipling Society, Bartleby.com, the Poetry Lover's Page, Wocky Jivvy, etc., and in numerous anthologies.
This is not actually an epigraph in Operator Commutation Relations by Palle E. T. Jorgensen and Robert T. Moore, D. Reidel, Dordrecht / Boston / Lancaster, 1984, but it is quoted in the Preface there as an epigraph in Functional Analysis and Semi-groups by Einar Hille, New York, American Mathematical Society, Providence, 1948.

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