“O cruel Time! O tyrant Time! Whose winter all the streams of rhyme, The flowing waves of Love sublime, In bitter passage freezes. I only see the scrambling goat, The lotos on the water float, While an old shepherd with an oat Pipes to the autumn breezes.”
Yes! here, once more, a traveller, I find the Angel Inn, Where landlord, maids, and serving-men, Receive me with a grin: They surely can’t remember _me_, My hair is grey and scanter; I’m chang’d, so chang’d since I was here— “O tempora mutantur!”
The Angel’s not much alter’d since That sunny month of June, Which brought me here with Pamela To spend our honey-moon! I recollect it down to e’en The shape of this decanter. We’ve since been both much put about— “O tempora mutantur!”
Aye, there’s the clock, and looking-glass Reflecting me again; She vow’d her Love was very fair— I see I’m very plain. And there’s that daub of Prince Leboo, ’Twas Pamela’s fond banter To fancy it resembled me— “O tempora mutantur!”
The curtains have been dyed; but there, Unbroken, is the same, The very same cracked pane of glass On which I scratch’d her name. Yes! there’s her tiny flourish still, It used to so enchant her To link two happy names in one— “O tempora mutantur!”
What brought this wand’rer here, and why Was Pamela away? It may be she had found her grave, Or he had found her gay. The fairest fade; the best of men May meet with a supplanter;— How natural, how trite the cry, “O tempora mutantur!”
“Often, when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour till tears have wetted my cheek for unutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture; * * nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes!”
Gay shops, stately palaces, bustle and breeze, The whirring of wheels, and the murmur of trees, By night, or by day, whether noisy or stilly, Whatever my mood is—I love Piccadilly.
Wet nights, when the gas on the pavement is streaming, And young Love is watching, and old Love is dreaming, And Beauty is whirl’d off to conquest, where shrilly Cremona makes nimble thy toes, Piccadilly!