Nostalgia

Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story; The days of our youth are the days of our glory; And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.

I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days— All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore— The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.

Praising what is lost Makes the remembrance dear.

True is it that we have seen better days.

Let the dozing soul remember, let the mind awake and revive by contemplating how our life goes by so swiftly and how our death comes near so silently; how quickly pleasure fades, and how when it is recalled it give us pain, how we seem always to think that times past must have been better than today.

But where are the snows of yesteryear? 2

Ye, fare wel al the snow of ferne yere! 6

For of fortunes sharpe adversitee The worste kynde of infortune is this, A man to han ben in prosperitee, And it remembren, whan it passed is.

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.