IF youth could know, what age knows without teaching,
Hope’s instability and Love’s dear folly,
The difference between practising and preaching,
The quiet charm that lurks in melancholy;
The after-bitterness of tasted pleasure;
That temperance of feeling and of words
Is health of mind, and the calm fruits of leisure
Have sweeter taste than feverish zeal affords;
That reason has a joy beyond unreason;
That nothing satisfies the soul like truth;
That kindness conquers in and out of season,—
If youth could know—why, youth would not be youth.
If age could feel the uncalculating urgence,
The pulse of life that beats in youthful veins,
And with its swift, resistless ebb and surgence
Makes light of difficulties, sport of pains;
Could once, just once, retrace the path and find it,
That lovely, foolish zeal, so crude, so young,
Which bids defiance to all laws to bind it,
And flashes in quick eye and limb and tongue,
Which, counting dross for gold, is rich in dreaming,
And, reckoning moons as suns, is never cold,
And, having naught, has everything in seeming,—
If age could do all this—age were not old!