As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.

"Sixty-Eighth Birthday,’’ by James Russell Lowell (1819-1991)

Lowell, of a famous Boston Brahmin family, was a Romantic poet, critic, editor and diplomat. He is associated with the “Fireside Poets,’’ a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets whose popularity rivaled that of British poets.