Classic Poem

Altho' the Present fruits and sums
The Past, and all the Bygone holds,
Yet ever new my soul becomes,
Not merely blossoms and unfolds.

A Mind directs the plasmic flow;
A Will inspires the plastic soul;
And ever something new I grow,
Like sequent writing on a scroll,

Where every word transmutes the last,
And by a prescient phrase is wrought,
Out of the phrases of the Past,
A new-created crescent thought.

You praise the child. I have no part
In all his vanished grace and joy;
You blame the youth; but in my heart
Lies cold and dumb and dead the boy.

I am not old nor young, for I
Can laugh the passing years to scorn,
Who every moment fade and die,
And every moment am reborn.

The stream of Life we cannot stay,
Nor fix Life's restless, leaping flame.
I never was : I always am:
Yet not an instant am the same.