Classic Poem

ON HER BIRTHDAY .

B Y a not uncommon freak of fate
I can not mend,
Your invitation came too late
To enable me, in proper state,
To honor the day you celebrate,
My old-time friend.

It would do no good to fume and fret,
To pout or pine;
But for many a day I shall regret
That I was not with the friends who met
To keep your birthday fete — and yet
The loss was mine.

You have traveled nearly as far as I
On life's highway.
We met when our summer sun was high,
The promise fair for a cloudless sky;
But two-score years have flitted by
Since that far day.

We did our best, in those old, dead years
That went and came;
The world was not, as it now appears,
But we had our cares, our hopes and fears,
Our short-lived joys and bitter tears,
Our praise and blame.

We wrought in the storm, the wintry blast
And burning sun;
Hoped on, when our sky was overcast,
Clung, on the wreck, to the tottering mast;
The storm is spent and the danger past —
But what is won?

The loss, too surely, outweighs the gain
For which we strove;
Some cherished memories still remain.
The graves we made, with tears and pain,
And some odd links of the broken chain
Of household love.

But the dear old friends have nearly all
Now passed away
Beyond the reach of our love's recall;
Beyond the shadow, beyond the thrall
Of the countless ills that needs must fall
Along life's way.

With the friends we won in the paths of youth,
Life's brightness ends;
We tried and trusted their love and truth,
But, alas! for love, and loss, and ruth,
We shall find their like no more, in sooth —
Age makes no friends.

We know, by the milestones on the way
We twain have passed,
And eke by the sunset's lessening ray,
And by the lengthening shadows gray,
That the twilight of our busy day
Is falling fast.

Would we start again where we begun
When hope was high —
Where the first fair thread of life was spun,
In the rosy light of the morning sun,
And strive for the guerdon we have won?
So would not I.

Our lives are not as we hoped and planned,
In good and gain,
But a Father leads us by the hand,
Through darkening paths of the evening-land,
And what we have failed to understand
He will make plain.