“ How cold and wan the Present lowers O my true Love ! around us twain ; How little of the Past is ours ! How changed the friends who yet remain. “ We cannot without envying view The eyes with twenty summers gay, For eyes, ’neath which our childhood grew, Have long since passed from earth away. “ Each hour still steals our youth ; alas ! No hour will e’er the theft restore ; There’s but one thing that will not pass,— The heart I loved thee with of yore. “ That heart which plays in life its part, With love elate, with loss forlorn, Is still—through all—the child’s pure heart My mother gave when I was born. “ That heart, where nothing new can light, Where old thoughts draw their cherish’d breath, It loves thee, dear, with all the might That Life can wield in strife with Death. “ If it of Death the conqueror be, If there’s in Man some nobler part That wins him Immortality, Then thou hast, Love ! that deathless heart.”