The years chase playful rhyme behind me,
And Ialas, I must confess
Pursue her now a good deal less.
My pen has lost its disposition
To mar the fleeting page with verse;
For other, colder dreams I nurse,
And sterner cares now seek admission;
And mid the hum and hush of life,
They haunt my soul with dreams of strife.
44
I've learned the voice of new desires
And come to know a new regret;
The first within me light no fires,
And I lament old sorrows yet.
O dreams! Where has your sweetness vanished?
And where has youth (glib rhyme) been banished?
Can it be true, its bloom has passed,
Has withered, withered now at last?
Can it be true, my heyday's ended
All elegiac play aside That now indeed my spring has died
(As I in jest so oft pretended)?
And is there no return of youth?
Shall I be thirty soon, in truth?
45
And so, life's afternoon has started,
As I must now admit, I see.
But let us then as friends be parted,
My sparkling youth, before you flee!
I thank you for your host of treasures,
For pain and grief as well as pleasures,
For storms and feasts and worldly noise,
For all your gifts and all your joys;
My thanks to you. With you I've tasted,
Amid the tumult and the still,
Life's essence . . . and enjoyed my fill.
Enough! Clear-souled and far from wasted,
I start upon an untrod way
To take my rest from yesterday.
46
But one glance back. Farewell, you bowers,
Sweet wilderness in which I spent
Impassioned days and idle hours,
And filled my soul with dreams, content.
And you, my youthful inspiration,
Come stir the bleak imagination,
Enrich the slumbering heart's dull load,
More often visit my abode;
Let not the poet's soul grow bitter
Or harden and congeal alone,
