Kind friends, sweet friends, I hold it hardly fair With that same bird your minstrel to compare, Yet in a certain likeness we agree-- No wrong to him, and no offence to me; I take him for the moral he has lent, My partner--to a limited extent. When the stern landlord, whom we all obey, Has carved from life its seventh great slice away, Is the poor fragment left in blank collapse A pauper remnant of unvalued scraps? I care not much what Solomon has said, Before his time to nobler pleasures dead; Poor man! he needed half a hundred lives With such a babbling wilderness of wives! But is there nothing that may well employ Life's winter months--no sunny hour of joy? While o'er the fields the howling tempests rage, The prisoned linnet warbles in his cage; When chill November through the forest blows The greenhouse shelters the untroubled rose, Round the high trellis creeping tendrils twine, And the ripe clusters fill with blameless wine, We make the vine forget the winter's cold, But how shall age forget it's growing old? Though doing right is better than deceit, Time is a trickster it is fair to cheat; The honest watches ticking in your fobs Tell every minute how the rascal robs. To clip his forelock and his scythe to hide, To lay his hour-glass gently on its side, To slip the cards he marked upon the shelf, And deal him others you have marked yourself, If not a virtue, cannot be a sin, For the old rogue is sure at last to win. What does he leave when life is well-nigh spent To lap its evening in a calm content? Art, Letters, Science, these at least befriend Our day's brief remnant to its peaceful end-- Peaceful for him who shows the setting sun A record worthy of his Lord's "well done!" When he, the Master whom I will not name, Known to our calling, not unknown to fame, At life's extremest verge half-conscious lay, Helpless and sightless, dying day by day,