I know not why my soul is rack’d
Why I ne’er smile as was my wont:
I only know that, as a fact,
I don’t.
I used to roam o’er glen and glade
Buoyant and blithe as other folk:
And not unfrequently I made
A joke.
A minstrel’s fire within me burn’d,
I’d sing, as one whose heart must break,
Lay upon lay: I nearly learn’d
To shake.
All day I sang; of love, of fame,
Of fights our fathers fought of yore,
Until the thing almost became
A bore.
I cannot sing the old songs now!
It is not that I deem them low;
’Tis that I can’t remember how
They go.
I could not range the hills till high
Above me stood the summer moon:
And as to dancing, I could fly
As soon.
The sports, to which with boyish glee
I sprang erewhile, attract no more;
Although I am but sixty-three
Or four.
Nay, worse than that, I’ve seem’d of late
To shrink from happy boyhood—boys
Have grown so noisy, and I hate
A noise.
They fright me, when the beech is green,
By swarming up its stem for eggs:
They drive their horrid hoops between
My legs:—
It’s idle to repine, I know;
I’ll tell you what I’ll do instead:
I’ll drink my arrowroot, and go
To bed.
FIRST LOVE.
O my earliest love, who, ere I number’d
Ten sweet summers, made my bosom thrill!
Will a swallow—or a swift, or some bird—
Fly to her and say, I love her still?
Say my life’s a desert drear and arid,
To its one green spot I aye recur:
Never, never—although three times married—
Have I cared a jot for aught but her.
No, mine own! though early forced to leave you,
Still my heart was there where first we met;
In those “Lodgings with an ample sea-view,”
Which were, forty years ago, “To Let.”
There I saw her first, our landlord’s oldest
Little daughter. On a thing so fair
Thou, O Sun,—who (so they say) beholdest
Everything,—hast gazed, I tell thee, ne’er.