Too Late
“Ah! Si la Jeunesse Savait — Si la Vieillenne Pouvait!”
There sat an old man on a rock,
And unceasing bewailed him of Fate,—
That concern where we all must take stock
Though our vote has no hearing or weight;
And the old man sang him an old, old song,—
Never sang voice so clear and strong
That it could drown the old man’s long,
For he sang the song “Too late! too late!”
“When we want, we have for our pains
The promise that if we but wait
Till the want has burned out of our brains,
Every means shall be present to sate;
While we send for the napkin the soup gets cold,
While the bonnet is trimming the face grows old,
When we’ve matched our buttons the pattern is sold,
And everything comes too late,—too late!
“When strawberries seemed like red heavens,—
Terrapin stew a wild dream,—
When my brain was at sixes and sevens,
If my mother had “folks” and ice-cream,
Then I gazed with a lickerish hunger
At the restaurant-man and fruit-monger,—
But oh! how I wished I were younger
When the goodies all came in a stream, in a stream!
“I’ve a splendid blood horse, and—a liver
That it jars into torture to trot;
My row-boat’s the gem of the river,—
Gout makes every knuckle a knot!
I can buy boundless credits on Paris and Rome,
But no palate for ménus,—no eyes for a dome,—
Those belonged to the youth who must tarry at home,
When no home but an attic he’d got,—he’d got!
“How I longed, in that lonest of garrets,
Where the tiles baked my brains all July,
For ground to grow two pecks of carrots,
Two pigs of my own in a sty,
A rosebush,—a little thatched cottage,—
Two spoons—love—a basin of pottage!—
Now in freestone I sit,—and my dotage,—
With a woman’s chair empty close by,—close by!
“Ah! now, though I sit on a rock,
I have shared one seat with the great;
I have sat—knowing naught of the clock—
On love’s high throne of state;
But the lips that kissed, and the arms that caressed,
To a mouth grown stern with delay were pressed,
And circled a breast that their clasp had blessed
Had they only not come too late,—too late!”
Fitz-Hugh Ludlow.