Poetry as Legal Terminology

Do you constitutional lawyers know the provenance of the phrase “all deliberate speed” – the remedial formula adopted in Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294 (1955)?  While Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes attributed this line to the English Chancery when first using in a reported American decision, Virginia v. West Virginia, 222 U.S. 17, 19 (1911), its origin is a variant on a line from an 1893 poem by the British metaphysical-symbolist poet Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven”: “Deliberate speed, majestic instancy.” James Ming Chen, Poetic Justice, 28 Cardozo Law Review 581, 584 (2006).