This perhaps is the world's first emoticon -- a smiley face was discovered in Robert Herrick's poem To Fortune, which was written back in 1648.

Literary critic Levi Stahl came across the civil war poet's work that seems to include the first possible use of the smiley face, ":)," which appears in the second line: "Tumble me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins, (smiling yet :)."

Stahl wanted to know whether the mark is just a typo in his poetry book Hesperides, so he checked by comparing it to a two-volume version of Herrick's poetry published by Oxford University Press last year. He then found out that the emoticon is also included in the different publication. "Herrick's poetry is rich in wit, so it's not entirely out of the bounds of possibility that this is something more than a punctuational oddity," Stahl wrote on his blog.

If the mark was intentionally used to show a smile, then it would actually predate another emoticon by two hundred years - the winking emoticon was found in a New York Times transcript of Abraham Lincoln's 1862 speech in 2009: "FELLOW CITIZENS: I believe there is no precedent for my appearing before you on this occasion, [applause] but it is also true that there is no precedent for your being here yourselves, (applause and laughter ;) and I offer, in justification of myself and of you, that, upon examination, I have found nothing in the Constitution against. [Renewed applause.]."

However, Alan Jacobs of The New Atlantis disagrees by saying that Stahl's discovery is "ahistorical." "So it's possible, I'd say likely, that the parenthesis in the poem was inserted by a modern editor," he said. "Not that parentheses weren't used in verse in Herrick's time -- they were -- but not as widely as we use them today and not in the same situations. Punctuation in general was unsettled in the seventeenth century."