I roam through clans of savage men, Untamed by arts, untaught by pen; Or cower within some squalid den O'er reeking soil. Through paths that halt from stone to stone, Amid the din of tongues unknown, One image haunts my soul alone, Thine, gentle Thrale! Soothes she, I ask, her spouse's care? Does mother-love its charge prepare? Stores she her mind with knowledge rare, Or lively tale? Forget me not! thy faith I claim, Holding a faith that cannot die, That fills with thy benignant name These shores of Sky." "On another occasion," says Mrs. Thrale, in the "Anecdotes," "I can boast verses from Dr. Johnson. As I went into his room the morning of my birthday once and said to him, 'Nobody sends me any verses now, because I am five-and-thirty years old; and Stella was fed with them till forty-six, I remember.' My being just recovered from illness and confinement will account for the manner in which he burst out suddenly, for so he did without the least previous hesitation whatsoever, and without having entertained the smallest intention towards it half a minute before: "Oft in danger, yet alive, We are come to thirty-five; Long may better years arrive, Better years than thirty-five. Could philosophers contrive Life to stop at thirty-five, Time his hours should never drive O'er the bounds of thirty-five. High to soar, and deep to dive, Nature gives at thirty-five. Ladies, stock and tend your hive, Trifle not at thirty-five; For howe'er we boast and strive, Life declines from thirty-five; He that ever hopes to thrive Must begin by thirty-five; And all who wisely wish to wive Must look on Thrale at thirty-five." "'And now,' said he, as I was writing them down, 'you may see what it is to come for poetry to a dictionary-maker; you may observe that the rhymes run in alphabetical order exactly.' And so they do." Byron's estimate of life at the same age, is somewhat different: "Too old for youth--too young, at thirty-five To herd with boys, or hoard with good threescore, I wonder people should he left alive. But since they are, that epoch is a bore." Lady Aldborough, whose best witticisms unluckily lie under the same merited ban as Rochester's best verses, resolved not to pass twenty-five, and had her passport made out accordingly till her death at eighty-five. She used to boast that, whenever a foreign official objected, she never failed to silence him by the remark, that he was the first gentleman of his country who ever told a lady she was older than she said she was. Actuated probably by a similar feeling, and in the hope of securing to herself the benefit of the doubt, Mrs. Thrale omitted in the "Anecdotes" the year when these verses were addressed to her, and a sharp controversy has been raised as to the respective ages of herself and Dr. Johnson at the time. It is thus summed up by one of the combatants: