Once

There are no days like the other days,
    The sweet, mysterious Once,
When we had best times and merriest plays,
Brave rowing and gallant hunts!
No cycle of history stands so deep
    In the golden purple haze,
No dream so fairy in careless sleep
    As the day-dream of those days.

There were nooks that no man ever saw
    Since the loss of Aladdin’s lamp;
Caverns of magic in buckwheat straw
    In the rye-ricks and mere golden camps!
Then apples were better than oranges now,
    And oranges better than gold;
Then the crow-nest up in the tallest bough
    Flung challenges to the bold.

The summer pool where we dived and swam
    Was a chasm, how dark and deep!
And where we leaped from the saw-mill dam
    Sam Patch would have feared to leap!
But the dingy, pitiful thing has shrunk
    Till its hardly shoulder-high;
And the bird that caws on the stunted trunk,
    You can see the wink of his eye!

No man can reckon the ? age of a Boy
    In his endless, fresh forenoon,
When a year outlasted the siege of Troy,
    And every night had a moon!
I remember a hundred Christmases,
    And a hundred July suns;
And a thousand bristling chestnut-trees
    We clubbed and climbed up, — Once.

What beautiful pike, what splendid trout,
    We caught in the roaring brook;
That school of giants has all run out, 
    Not a fin left worth the hook!
The raging torrent has dried up so
    It is only a sedgy rill,
And the mountain that fed it has stooped so low
    As to stand for a little hill!

The poor old world has shrivelled away
    To a paltry pinch of mud,
Not a tithe so big as it was one day, —
    O, long before the Flood,
When I was a Boy, and boys were smart, —
    And Time crept by with a staff!
Now, his years get round before they start,
    For they run by telegraph!