English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Thomas Campbell
456. The River of Life
T
Our life’s succeeding stages:
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages.
Ere passion yet disorders,
Steals lingering like a river smooth
Along its grassy borders.
And sorrow’s shafts fly thicker,
Ye Stars, that measure life to man,
Why seem your courses quicker?
And life itself is vapid,
Why, as we reach the Falls of Death,
Feel we its tide more rapid?
Time’s course to slower speeding,
When one by one our friends have gone
And left our bosoms bleeding?
Indemnifying fleetness;
And those of youth, a seeming length,
Proportion’d to their sweetness.