"When strawberries seemed like red heavens,—
Terrapin stew a wild dream,—
When my brain was at sixes and sevens,
If my mother had "folks" and ice-cream,
Then I gazed with a lickerish hunger
At the restaurant-man and fruit-monger,—
But oh! how I wished I were younger
When the goodies all came in a stream, in a stream!
"I've a splendid blood horse, and—a liver
That it jars into torture to trot;
My row-boat's the gem of the river,—
Gout makes every knuckle a knot!
I can buy boundless credits on Paris and Rome,
But no palate for ménus,—no eyes for a dome,—
Those belonged to the youth who must tarry at home,
When no home but an attic he'd got,—he'd got!
"How I longed, in that lonest of garrets,
Where the tiles baked my brains all July,
For ground to grow two pecks of carrots,
Two pigs of my own in a sty,
A rosebush,—a little thatched cottage,—
Two spoons—love—a basin of pottage!—
Now in freestone I sit,—and my dotage,—
With a woman's chair empty close by,—close by!
"Ah! now, though I sit on a rock,
I have shared one seat with the great;
I have sat—knowing naught of the clock—
On love's high throne of state;
But the lips that kissed, and the arms that caressed,
To a mouth grown stern with delay were pressed,
And circled a breast that their clasp had blessed
Had they only not come too late,—too late!"
Fitz-Hugh Ludlow.
A PETITION TO TIME.
Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy stream
Gently,—as we sometimes glide
Through a quiet dream!
Humble voyagers are we,
Husband, wife, and children three,—
(One is lost,—an angel, fled
To the azure overhead!)
Touch us gently, Time!
We've not proud nor soaring wings,
Our ambition, our content,
Lies in simple things.
Humble voyagers are we,
O'er Life's dim, unsounded sea,
Seeking only some calm clime;—
Touch us gently, gentle Time!
Bryan Waller Procter.