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 his 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