Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1875-07-10
NO. 162.

| With downcast eyes was passing on his way,
Paused, and observed the spot and marked il we'll
| Whereon the shadow of the finger fell;
And, coming back at midnight, delved, and found
secret stairway leading under ground.
Down this he passed into q spacious hall
| Lit by flaming jewel on the wall:
And opposite brazen statne stood
With bow and shaft in threatening attitude
| Upon its forehead, like a coronet,
Were these my sterious words OF menace set:
"That which am, am my fatal aim
None can escape, not even yon luminous namcin
Midway the hall was a fair table placed,
With cloth of gold, and golden cups enchascd
With rubies, and the plates and knives were gold
And gold the bread and viands manifold.
Around it, silent, moti0nts ss and sad,
Were seated gallant knights in armor clad.
And ladies beautiful, with plume and zone,
But they were stone; their hearts within
stone;
And the vast hall was filled in every part
With silent crowds, stony in face and heart.
Long at the scene, bewildered and amazed,
The treu bling clerk IN speechless wonder gazed
Then from the table, by his greed made bold,
He seized goblet and a knife of gold,
nd suddenly from their seats the guests upspranx,
The vaulted ceiling with loud camors rang,
The archer sped his arrow, at their CALL
Shatlering tie lambent jewel on the wall,
And all was dark around and ogerhead:-
Stark on the floor the luckiess clerk lay dead!
The writer of this legend then records
Its ghostly application in these words:
The image is the Adversary old,
Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold;
Our iusts and pas sions are the downward stair
That leads the soul from dviner air;
The archer, DEATH the flaming jewel Life;
Terrestrial goods, the goblet ana the knife;
The knights and ladies, all whose flesh and bone
By avarce lave teen hardened into stone;
The clerk, the scholar whom the love of peif
Tempts from his books and IRON his nobier self.
The scholar and the world The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of fei
The love of learning, the sequestered nook.
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market place, the love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity and whose end is pain
But why you ask me, should this tale be told
To men grown old, or who are growing old?
Ii is too late All, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Hdpus, and Simonides
Bore of the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than iourscore
years;
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his Characters of Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the Aghtingalcs,
AT sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past.
How far the Gulf stream OF OR youth may hoW
Into the arctic regions of our lives,
Where little else than life itself survives.
As the barometer foretells the storm
While still the skies clear, the weather warm
So something in us, old age draws near,
Betrays the pressure of the atmosphere.
The nimble mercury ere We are aware,
Descends the elastic ladder OF the air;
The tclltale blood in artery and in vein
Sinks from its higher Levels in the brain;
Whatever poet, orator or sage
May say of it, Old age s still old age.
Ii is the waning, not the crescent moon,
The dusk of evening, not the blaze Of noon;
1t is not strength, but weakness; not desire,
But its surcease not the fierce heat of fire,
The burning and consuming element,
But that of ashes and of embers spent,
In which some living sparks We still discerr,
Enough to warm, but not enough to bum
What then? Shall we sit idly down and say
The Night hath come; it is no longer day?
The night hath not YET come We are not quite
uf ri labor
Something remains for us TO do or dare;
Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear;
Not Edipus CoODeus, or Greek Ode,
Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode
Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn,
But other something, would we but begin;
For age Is opportunity no less
Than youth itself though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The SKY is filed with stars, invisible by day.