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The Riker would have built a barge
Or steamboat at the city’s charge,
And passed it with his wife and daughters.

But let that pass. As I have said,
There’s naught, save laurels, on your head,
And time has changed my clustering hair,
And showered the snow-flakes thickly there;
And though our lives have ever been
As different as their different scene;
Mine more renowned for rhymes than riches,
Yours less for scholarship than speeches;
Mine passed in low-roofed leafy bower,
Yours in high halls of pomp and power,
Yet are we, be the moral told,
Alike in one thing—growing old,
Ripened like summer’s cradled sheaf,
Faded like autumn’s falling leaf—
And nearing, sail and signal spread,
The quiet anchorage of the dead.
For such is human life, wherever
The voyage of its bark may be,
On home’s green-banked and gentle river,
Or the world’s shoreless, sleepless sea.

Yes, you have floated down the tide
Of time, a swan in grace and pride
And majesty and beauty, till
The law, the Ariel of your will,