was passion,
To love her, the fashion;
What wonder my heart was unwilling to wait!
And, daring to love her,
I soon did discover
A Katherine masking in mischievous Kate.

No Katy unruly
But Katherine, truly--
Fond, serious, patient, and even sedate;
With a glow in her gladness
That banishes sadness--
Yet stay! Should I credit the sunshine to Kate?

Love cannot outlive it,
Wealth cannot o'ergive it--
The saucy surrender she made at the gate.
O Time, be but human,
Spare the girl in the woman!
You gave me my Katherine--leave me my Kate!

Robert Underwood Johnson [1853-

GROWING OLD

Sweet sixteen is shy and cold,
Calls me "sir," and thinks me old;
Hears in an embarrassed way
All the compliments I pay;

Finds my homage quite a bore,
Will not smile on me, and more
To her taste she finds the noise
And the chat of callow boys.

Not the lines around my eye,
Deepening as the years go by;
Not white hairs that strew my head,
Nor my less elastic tread;

Cares I find, nor joys I miss,
Make me feel my years like this:--
Sweet sixteen is shy and cold,
Calls me "sir," and thinks me old.

Walter Learned [1847-1915]

TIME'S REVENGE

When I was ten and she fifteen--
Ah, me! how fair I thought her.
She treated with disdainful mien
The homage that I brought her,
And, in a patronizing way,
Would of my shy advances say:
"It's really quite absurd, you see;
He's very much too young for me."

I'm twenty now, she twenty-five--
Well, well! how old she's growing.
I fancy that my suit might thrive
If pressed again; but, owing
To great discrepancy in age,
Her marked attentions don't engage
My young affections, for, you see,
She's really quite too old for me.

Walter Learned [1847-1915]

IN EXPLANATION

Her lips were so near
That--what else could I do?
You'll be angry, I fear.
But her lips were so near--
Well, I can't make it clear,
Or explain it to you.
But--her lips were so near
That--what else could I do?

Walter Learned [1847-1915]

OMNIA VINCIT

Long from the lists of love I stood aloof
My heart was steeled and I was beauty-proof;
Yet I, unscathed in many a peril past,
Lo! here am I defeated at the last.

My practice was, in easy-chair reclined,
Superior-wise to speak of womankind,
Waving away the worn-out creed of love
To join the smoke that wreathed itself above.

Love, I said in my wisdom, Love is dead,
For all his fabled triumphs--and instead
We find a calm aff