Little snatch of ancient song

What has made thee live so long?

Flying on thy wings of rhyme

Lightly down the depths of time,

Telling nothing strange or rare,

Scarce a thought or image there,

Nothing but the old, old tale

Of a hapless lover’s wail;

Offspring of some idle hour,

Whence has come thy lasting power?

By what turn of rhythm or phrase,

By what subtle, careless grace

Can thy music charm our ears

After full three hundred years?

Little song, since thou wert born

In the Reformation morn,

How much great has past away,

Shattered or by slow decay!

Stately piles in ruins crumbled,

Lordly houses lost or humbled.

Thrones and realms in darkness hurled,

Noble flags forever furled,

Wisest schemes by statesmen spun,

Time has seen them one by one

Like the leaves of autumn fall—

A little song outlives them all.

There were mighty scholars then

With the slow, laborious pen

Piling up their works of learning,

Men of solid, deep discerning,

Widely famous as they taught

Systems of connected thought,

Destined for all future ages;

Now the cobweb binds their pages,

All unread their volumes lie

Mouldering so peaceably,

Coffined thoughts of coffined men.

Never more to stir again

In the passion and the strife,

In the fleeting forms of life;

All their force and meaning gone

As the stream of thought flows on.

Art thou weary, little song,

Flying through the world so long?

Canst thou on thy fairy pinions

Cleave the future’s dark dominions?

And with music soft and clear

Charm the yet unfashioned ear,

Mingling with the things unborn

When perchance another morn

The pulse of thought is beating quicker,

The lamp of faith begins to flicker,

The ancient reverence decays

With forms and types of other days;

And old beliefs grow faint and few

As knowledge moulds the world anew,

And scatters far and wide the seeds

Of other hopes and other creeds;

And all in vain we seek to trace

The fortunes of the coming race,

Some with fear and some with hope,

None can cast its horoscope.

Vap’rous lamp or rising star,

Many a light is seen afar,

And dim shapeless figures loom

All around us in the gloom—

Forces that may rise and reign

As the old ideals wane.

Landmarks of the human mind,

One by one are left behind,

And a subtle change is wrought

In the mould and cast of thought,

Modes of reasoning pass away,

Types of beauty lose their sway,

Creeds and causes that have made

Many noble lives, must fade;

And the words that thrilled of old

Now seem hueless, dead, and cold;

Fancy’s rainbow tints are flying,

Thoughts, like men, are slowly dying;

All things perish, and the strongest

Often do not last the longest;

The stately ship is seen no more,

The fragile skiff attains the shore;

And while the great and wise decay,

And all their trophies pass away,

Some sudden thought, some careless rhyme

Still floats above the wrecks of time.