Little snatch of ancient song
What has made thee live so long?
Flying on thy wings of rhyme
Lightly down the depths of time,
Telling nothing strange or rare,
Scarce a thought or image there,
Nothing but the old, old tale
Of a hapless lover’s wail;
Offspring of some idle hour,
Whence has come thy lasting power?
By what turn of rhythm or phrase,
By what subtle, careless grace
Can thy music charm our ears
After full three hundred years?
Little song, since thou wert born
In the Reformation morn,
How much great has past away,
Shattered or by slow decay!
Stately piles in ruins crumbled,
Lordly houses lost or humbled.
Thrones and realms in darkness hurled,
Noble flags forever furled,
Wisest schemes by statesmen spun,
Time has seen them one by one
Like the leaves of autumn fall—
A little song outlives them all.
There were mighty scholars then
With the slow, laborious pen
Piling up their works of learning,
Men of solid, deep discerning,
Widely famous as they taught
Systems of connected thought,
Destined for all future ages;
Now the cobweb binds their pages,
All unread their volumes lie
Mouldering so peaceably,
Coffined thoughts of coffined men.
Never more to stir again
In the passion and the strife,
In the fleeting forms of life;
All their force and meaning gone
As the stream of thought flows on.
Art thou weary, little song,
Flying through the world so long?
Canst thou on thy fairy pinions
Cleave the future’s dark dominions?
And with music soft and clear
Charm the yet unfashioned ear,
Mingling with the things unborn
When perchance another morn
Great as that which gave thee birth
Dawns upon the changing earth?
It may be so, for all around
With a heavy crashing sound
Like the ice of polar seas
Melting in the summer breeze,
Signs of change are gathering fast,
Nations breaking with their past.
The pulse of thought is beating quicker,
The lamp of faith begins to flicker,
The ancient reverence decays
With forms and types of other days;
And old beliefs grow faint and few
As knowledge moulds the world anew,
And scatters far and wide the seeds
Of other hopes and other creeds;
And all in vain we seek to trace
The fortunes of the coming race,
Some with fear and some with hope,
None can cast its horoscope.
Vap’rous lamp or rising star,
Many a light is seen afar,
And dim shapeless figures loom
All around us in the gloom—
Forces that may rise and reign
As the old ideals wane.
Landmarks of the human mind,
One by one are left behind,
And a subtle change is wrought
In the mould and cast of thought,
Modes of reasoning pass away,
Types of beauty lose their sway,
Creeds and causes that have made
Many noble lives, must fade;
And the words that thrilled of old
Now seem hueless, dead, and cold;
Fancy’s rainbow tints are flying,
Thoughts, like men, are slowly dying;
All things perish, and the strongest
Often do not last the longest;
The stately ship is seen no more,
The fragile skiff attains the shore;
And while the great and wise decay,
And all their trophies pass away,
Some sudden thought, some careless rhyme
Still floats above the wrecks of time.
_Macmillan’s Magazine._