Читать книгу The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Various - Страница 2

Oh Time! I’ll weave, to deck thy brow,

A wreath fresh culled from Flora’s treasure:

If thou wilt backward turn thy flight

To youth’s bright morn of joy and pleasure.

‘Joys ill exchanged for riper years;’

The bard, alas! hath truly spoken:

I’ve wept the truth in burning tears

O’er many a fair hope crushed and broken.

In vain my sager, wiser friends

Told of thy speed and wing untiring;

I drank of Pleasure’s honied cup,

Nor marked thy flight, no change desiring;

When all too late I gave thee chase,

But found thou couldst not be o’ertaken:

With heedless wing thou’st onward swept,

Though hopes were crushed and empires shaken.

Thou with the world thy flight began’st;

Compared with thine, what were the knowledge

Of every sage in every clime,

The learning of the school or college?

Thou’st seen, in all the pomp of power,

Athens, the proudest seat of learning;

And thou couldst tell us if thou wouldst,

How Nero looked when Rome was burning.

What direful sights hast thou beheld,

As careless thou hast journied on:

The hemlock-bowl for Athen’s pride;

The gory field of Marathon;

The monarch crowned, the warrior plumed,

With power and with ambition burning;

Yet they must all have seemed to thee

Poor pigmies on a pivot turning.

Their pomp, their power, with thine compared,

How blank and void, how frail and fleeting!

Thou hast not paused e’en o’er their tombs

To give their mighty spirits greeting;

But onward still with untired wing,

Regardless thou ’rt thy flight pursuing,

Unseen, alas! till thou art past,

While o’er our heads thy snows thou ’rt strewing.

Oh! vainly may poor mortals strive

With learned lore of school and college;

Their books may teach us wisdom’s rules,

But thou alone canst teach us knowledge.

Oh! had I earlier known thy worth,

I had not now been left repining,

Nor asked to weave for thee the wreath

That on my youthful brow was shining.

Could but again the race be mine,

In life’s young morn, I’d seek and find thee;

I’d seize thee by thy flowing lock,

And never more be left behind thee!