The Daily Dispatch

Too Late.

There sat an old man on a rock,
That corner where we must take stock.
And unceasingly bewailed his Fate.
Though our voice has no harbinger weight :
And the old man sang him an old, old song
That could drown the old man's moan.
Never sang voice so clear and strong
For he sang the song "Too late : Too late !"

"When we want we have for our pains
Till the want has blown out of our brains
The proverb that if we but wait
Every man's wish be presented in state:
When we reach
For the waiting the soup gets
While the bonnet is trimming the face grows old,
When we've matched our button the pattern girl,
And everything comes too late—too late!"

I know it,

When with strawberries turned like red heavens-
When my brain was at ease and my veins
Terrapin stew a wild dream-
If my mother had 'folks' and cream,
That I gazed with a liquorish hunger
At the restaurant-man fruit-monger:
But oh : how I wish I were younger
When the goodies all came "in a stream-In a stream

"I've a splendid blood horse, and a jivet
My row-boat's the gem of the river.-
That it is now into torture to trot ;
Gout makes every knuckle a knot !
I can buy boundless credits on
Paris and
But no viands: for once-poor eyes for a donnt—
Jonr,
There too longed to the youth who must tarry
What no tongue but a lover's he'd told at lone hut.

"I too longed in that tanest of garrets
Where I baked my brain- all July.
For ground to grow two pecks-of carrots,
Two pigs of my own in a sty
A rose-bush—a little thatched cottage—
Two spoons—love—a handful of pottage:
So in free-time I'd—nd my cha
With a woman's charity close by-
close by :

"Though I sit on a rock.
I have shared one seat with the Great :
I have sat, knowing naught of the reign
On Love's high throne of state:
But the lips that kissed and the arms that caressed
To a mouth grown stern with decay were
And caressed a breast that their clasp had blessed
Had they only not come too late : too late ! "

By Hugh Lrdlor, in Harper's Magazine,