I 'm ashamed,--that 's the fact,--it 's a pitiful case,-- <br />Won't any kind classmate get up in my place? <br />Just remember how often I've risen before,-- <br />I blush as I straighten my legs on the floor! <br /> <br />There are stories, once pleasing, too many times told,-- <br />There are beauties once charming, too fearfully old,-- <br />There are voices we've heard till we know them so well, <br />Though they talked for an hour they'd have nothing to tell. <br /> <br />Yet, Classmates! Friends! Brothers! Dear blessed old boys! <br />Made one by a lifetime of sorrows and joys, <br />What lips have such sounds as the poorest of these, <br />Though honeyed, like Plato's, by musical bees? <br /> <br />What voice is so sweet and what greeting so dear <br />As the simple, warm welcome that waits for us here? <br />The love of our boyhood still breathes in its tone, <br />And our hearts throb the answer, 'He's one of our own!' <br /> <br />Nay! count not our numbers; some sixty we know, <br />But these are above, and those under the snow; <br />And thoughts are still mingled wherever we meet <br />For those we remember with those that we greet. <br /> <br />We have rolled on life's journey,--how fast and how far! <br />One round of humanity's many-wheeled car, <br />But up-hill and down-hill, through rattle and rub, <br />Old, true Twenty-niners! we've stuck to our hub! <br /> <br />While a brain lives to think, or a bosom to feel, <br />We will cling to it still like the spokes of a wheel! <br />And age, as it chills us, shall fasten the tire <br />That youth fitted round in his circle of fire!<br /><br />Oliver Wendell Holmes<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lines-27/
