| So many memories crowd upon my brain, So many ghosts are in the wooded plain, I fain would steal away, with noiseless tread, As from a house where some one lieth dead. I cannot go ; — I pause ; — I hesitate; To speak and cannot, to myself I seem. Vanish the dream! Vanish the idle fears! Vanish the rolling mists of fifty years! Whatever time or space may intervene, I will not be a stranger in this scene. Here every doubt, all indecision, ends; Hail, my companions, comrades, classmates, friends! Ah me! the fifty years since last we met By Time, the great transcriber, on his Seem to me fifty folios bound and set shelves, Wherein are written the histories of ourselves. What tragedies, what comedies, are there; As children frightened by a thunder- | But they were stone, their hearts within cloud Midway the hall was a fair table placed, The scholar and the world! The endWith cloth of gold, and golden cups en chased With rubies, and the plates and knives were gold, And gold the bread and viands manifold. Around it, silent, motionless, and sad, Were seated gallant knights in armor clad, less strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books; The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain ! And ladies beautiful with plume and But why, you ask me, should this tale be zone, told To men grown old, or who are growing old? It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpi tate. Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Edipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years, And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had but begun his Characters of Men Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales, At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales; Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past. These are indeed exceptions; but they show How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow Into the arctic regions of our lives, Where little else than life itself survives. As the barometer foretells the storm While still the skies are clear, the weather warm, So something in us, as old age draws near, Betrays the pressure of the atmosphere. The nimble mercury, ere we are aware, Descends the elastic ladder of the air; The telltale blood in artery and vein Sinks from its higher levels in the brain; noon: It is not strength, but weakness; not desire, But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire, The burning and consuming element, But that of ashes and of embers spent, In which some living sparks we still discern, Enough to warm, but not enough to burn. What then? Shall we sit idly down and say The night hath come; it is no longer day? The night hath not yet come; we are not quite Cut off from labor by the failing light; For age is opportunity no less And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. I fear no more the dust and heat, Let others traverse sea and land,` From them I learn whatever lies CADENABBIA. LAKE OF COMO. No sound of wheels or hoof-beat breaks As by the loveliest of all lakes I pace the leafy colonnade Where level branches of the plane At times a sudden rush of air By Somariva's garden gate I make the marble stairs my seat, And hear the water, as I wait, Lapping the steps beneath my feet. The undulation sinks and swells Along the stony parapets, And far away the floating bells Tinkle upon the fisher's nets. Silent and slow, by tower and town The freighted barges come and go, Their pendent shadows gliding down By town and tower submerged below. The hills sweep upward from the shore, With villas scattered one by one Upon their wooded spurs, and lower Bellaggio blazing in the sun. And dimly seen, a tangled mass Of walls and woods, of light and shade, |