Deep in our hidden heart
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
'Tis not to have our life
Ah! 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be.
What is it to grow old?
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it to feel each limb
And not once feel that we were ever young;
—Yes, but not this alone.
Yes, this, and more; but not,
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
The years that are no more.
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
It is to spend long days,
Which blamed the living man.
Is it to feel our strength—
It is to add, immured
It is to suffer this,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
To month with weary pain.
But no emotion,—none.
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,—
A golden day's decline.
The phantom of ourselves,
It is—last stage of all—
In the hot prison of the present, month
When we are frozen up within, and quite
Each nerve more loosely strung?