This moment I so careless threw away,
Tossed to the ages, with a spendthrift hand,
Little I recked the labour that had planned
This flash eternal of a Summer day;
AEons of sequent toil had passed to pay
Wealth to the freighted instant. Slow and grand
Wavers a solemn dirge across the land,
One soul, in my lost moment, found a way
To throw the mock to Time, and call him slave.
And I — a pauper still — gaze wise at last
To all the grey horizon line of nought.
But from the heart I deemed an empty grave
Gleams forth like spark my precious gem of past
Shrined in the setting of a deathless thought.