Grass of Parnassus

Transcribed from the 1888 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
RHYMES OLD AND NEW
BY ANDREW LANG
LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16 th STREET
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PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON
Primâ dicta mihi , summâ dicenda Camenâ .
The years will pass, and hearts will range, You conquer Time, and Care, and Change. Though Time doth still delight to shed The dust on many a younger head; Though Care, oft coming, hath the guile From younger lips to steal the smile; Though Change makes younger hearts wax cold, And sells new loves for loves of old, Time, Change, nor Care, hath learned the art To fleck your hair, to chill your heart, To touch your tresses with the snow, To mar your mirth of long ago. Change, Care, nor Time, while life endure, Shall spoil our ancient friendship sure, The love which flows from sacred springs, In ‘old unhappy far-off things,’ From sympathies in grief and joy, Through all the years of man and boy.
Therefore, to you, the rhymes I strung When even this ‘brindled’ head was young I bring, and later rhymes I bring That flit upon as weak a wing, But still for you, for yours, they sing!
Many of the verses and translations in this volume were published first in Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872). Though very sensible that they have the demerits of imitative and even of undergraduate rhyme, I print them again because people I like have liked them. The rest are of different dates, and lack (though doubtless they need) the excuse of having been written, like some of the earlier pieces, during College Lectures. I would gladly have added to this volume what other more or less serious rhymes I have written, but circumstances over which I have no control have bound them up with Ballades , and other toys of that sort.
It may be as well to repeat in prose, what has already been said in verse, that Grass of Parnassus, the pretty Autumn flower, grows in the marshes at the foot of the Muses’ Hill, and other hills, not at the top by any means.