Oh for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I’d rather laugh, a bright-haired boy,
Than reign, a gray-beard king.
Off with the spoils of wrinkled age!
Away with Learning’s crown!
Tear out Life’s Wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!
One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood’s fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!
* * * * *
My listening angel heard the prayer,
And, calmly smiling, said,
“If I but touch thy silvered hair
Thy hasty wish hath sped.
“But is there nothing in thy track,
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?”
“Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I’ll take--my--precious--wife!”
The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
_The man would be a boy again_,
_And be a husband too!_
“And is there nothing yet unsaid,
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years.”
“Why, yes;” for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
“I could not bear to leave them all--
I’ll take--my--girl--and--boys.”
The smiling angel dropped his pen,--
“Why, this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!”
* * * * *
And so I laughed,--my laughter woke
The household with its noise,--
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the grey-haired boys.
--“We,” said our host, as he closed the book and laid it aside, “are
like that: we would eliminate most of Elia and have our Elia too.”
“Yes,” said W. “Exactly. We want them all and we value them the more
as we grow older and they grow truer and better. For that is Lamb’s
way. He sat down--often in his employers’ time--to amuse the readers
of a new magazine and earn a few of those extra guineas which made it
possible to write ‘Old China,’ and behold he was shedding radiance
on almost every fact of life, no matter how spiritually recondite or
remote from his own practical experience. No one can rise from Elia
without being deepened and enriched; and no one having read Elia can
ever say either off-hand or after a year’s thought which one essay he
would retain to the loss of all the others.”
B. hitherto had been a silent listener. Here he spoke, and, as so
often, said the final thing. “Yes,” he said, “it is vain (but good
sport) to take any one of the essays and argue that it is the best.
Just as the best thing in a garden is not any particular flower but the
scent of all the flowers that are there, so the best of Lamb is not any
single essay but the fragrance of them all. It is for this that those
gentle paths have been trodden by so much good company.
“Yes,” he added meditatively. “‘The scent of Elia’s garden’! That is
the best essay, if you like, and ‘Charles (and Mary) Lamb’ its title.”