Classic Poem

Gone are the friends my boyhood knew,
Gone three score years since childhood's morn;
A lonely stalk I stand, where grew
And proudly waved the summer corn.

Scanning the record of my years,
How blank, how meagre seems the page;
How small the sum of good appears
Wrought by these hands from youth to age.

Yet, 'midst the toils and cares of life,
I've tried to keep a cheerful heart;
To curb my fiercer passions strife,
And as a man to act my part.

And I repine not at my lot,
Glad to have lived in times like these,
When mystic cords of human thought
Bind realm to realm across the seas.

When this dear land, Time's latest birth,
Strikes every chain from human hands,
And 'midst the nations of the earth,
The greatest, freest, noblest stands.

When progress in material things
Leads upward immaterial mind,
And into nearer prospect brings
The perfect life of all mankind.

Kindly, as yet, life's autumn sun
Gilds the green precincts of my home;
Softly, though fast, the moments run,
And fleeting seasons go and come.

Yet nearer moans the wintry blast,
The chilling wind of Age that blows,
Through darkening skies with cloud o'ercast,
With blinding sleet and drifting snows.

Ho! gleaner on life's wintry lea,
I hear the steps 'mid rustling leaves,
And soon this withered stalk will be
Close garnered with the autumn sheaves.

And then will He, beneath whose eye
Each act of right and wrong appears,
Aught of untarnished grain descry
Among these husks of wasted years?

Haply these mustering clouds that lower
On the low sky in seeming wrath
May vanish, and life's sunset hour,
Shed a calm radiance o'er my path.

Then may the clear horizon bring
Those glorious summits to the eye,
Where, flanked by fields of endless Spring,
The Cities of the Bleesed lie.