Classic Poem

Hid by the garret's dust, and lost
Amid the cobwebs wreathed above,
They lie, these volumes that have cost
Such weeks of hope and waste of love.

The Theologian's garnered lore
Of Scripture text, and words divine;
And verse, that to some fair one bore
Thoughts that like fadeless stars would shine;

The grand wrought epics, that were born
From mighty throes of heart and brain,—
Here rest, their covers all unworn,
And all their pages free from stain.

Here lie the chronicles that told
Of man, and his heroic deeds—
Alas! the words once ‘writ in gold’
Are tarnished so that no one reads.

And tracts that smote each other hard,
While loud the friendly plaudits rang,
All animosities discard,
Where old, moth-eaten garments hang.

The heroes that were made to strut
In tinsel on ‘life's mimic stage’
Found, all too soon, the deepening rut
Which kept them silent in the page;

And heroines, whose loveless plight
Should wake the sympathetic tear,
In volumes sombre as the night
Sleep on through each succeeding year.

Here Phyllis languishes forlorn,
And Strephon waits beside his flocks,
And early huntsmen wind the horn,
Within the boundaries of a box.

Here, by the irony of fate,
Beside the ‘peasant's humble board,’
The monarch ‘flaunts his robes of state,’
And spendthrifts find the miser's hoard.

Days come and go, and still we write,
And hope for some far happier lot
Than that our work should meet this blight—
And yet—some books must be forgot.