LOVE AND AGE

By Thomas Love Peacock

I PLAY’D with you ’mid cowslips blowing,

When I was six and you were four;

When garlands weaving, flower-balls throwing,

Were pleasures soon to please no more.

Through groves and meads, o’er grass and heather,

With little playmates, to and fro,

We wander’d hand in hand together;

But that was sixty years ago.

You grew a lovely roseate maiden,

And still our early love was strong;

Still with no care our days were laden,

They glided joyously along;

And I did love you very dearly,

How dearly words want power to show;

I thought your heart was touch’d as nearly;

But that was fifty years ago.

Then other lovers came around you,

Your beauty grew from year to year,

And many a splendid circle found you

The centre of its glimmering sphere.

I saw you then, first vows forsaking,

On rank and wealth your hand bestow;

O, then I thought my heart was breaking!—

But that was forty years ago.

And I lived on, to wed another:

No cause she gave me to repine;

And when I heard you were a mother,

I did not wish the children mine.

My own young flock, in fair progression,

Made up a pleasant Christmas row:

My joy in them was past expression;

But that was thirty years ago.

You grew a matron plump and comely,

You dwelt in fashion’s brightest blaze;

My earthly lot was far more homely;

But I too had my festal days.

No merrier eyes have ever glisten’d

Around the hearth-stone’s wintry glow,

Than when my youngest child was christen’d;

But that was twenty years ago.

Time pass’d. My eldest girl was married,

And I am now a grandsire gray;

One pet of four years old I’ve carried

Among the wild-flower’d meads to play.

In our old fields of childish pleasure,

Where now, as then, the cowslips blow,

She fills her basket’s ample measure;

And that is not ten years ago.

But though first love’s impassion’d blindness

Has pass’d away in colder light,

I still have thought of you with kindness,

And shall do, till our last good-night.

The ever-rolling silent hours

Will bring a time we shall not know,

When our young days of gathering flowers

Will be an hundred years ago.