Youth rambles on life’s arid mount,
And strikes the rock, and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount,
The fount which shall not flow again.

The man mature with labour chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanish’d out of hand.

And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among the stones.
The mount is mute, the channel-dry;
And down he lays his weary bones.

*****

I don’t know why I delight in Matthew Arnold‘s beaten-down, downbeat poems… but I always have! 🙂 And isn’t his hair bizarrely fascinating?!?

Photo: by Elliott & Fry, published by Bickers & Son, woodburytype, circa 1883; published 1886