When we look back on hours long past away,
And every circumstance of joy, or woe
That goes to make this strange beguiling show,
Call’d life, as though it were of yesterday,
We start to learn our quickness of decay.
Still flies unwearied Time;--on still we go
And whither?--Unto endless weal or woe,
As we have wrought our parts in this brief play.
Yet many have I seen whose thin blanched locks
But ill became a head where Folly dwelt,
Who having past this storm with all its shocks,
Had nothing learnt from what they saw or felt:
Brave spirits! that can look, with heedless eye,
On doom unchangeable, and fixt eternity.
[5] Every-Day Book, i. 9.
[6] Clarkson’s History of Richmond, cited by a correspondent, A. B.
~Antiquities.~