Do not think that years leave us and find us the same! - Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

The man who seeks one thing in life and but one
May hope to achieve it before life is done;
But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes
Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows
A harvest of barren regrets.

Who can undo
What time hath done? who can win back the wind?
Beckon lost music from a broken lute?
Renew the redness of a last year's rose?
Or dig the sunken sunset from the deep?

'Twas a hand
White, delicate, dimpled, warm, languid, and bland.
The hand of a woman is often, in youth, Somewhat rough, somewhat red, somewhat graceless in truth;
Does its beauty refine, as its pulses grow calm,
Or as sorrow has cross'd the life-line in its palm.