Enjoy the spring of love and youth, To some good angel leave the rest; For time will teach thee soon the truth, There are no birds in last year's nest.

These lines are from Longfellow’s poem “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” a reflective lyric in which the speaker listens to an old clock’s refrain (“Forever—never! / Never—forever!”) and meditates on time’s irreversible passage. In that setting, the stanza functions as a brief counsel to the young: savor love and youth while they are present, and do not expect the past to be recoverable. The poem’s domestic scene—an old house with a stairway clock—frames the advice as something learned through lived experience, where the steady ticking becomes a moral reminder that seasons, opportunities, and affections move on.

The stanza urges the reader to embrace the fleeting “spring” of youth and love rather than postponing happiness or trying to preserve what time inevitably changes. The image of “last year’s nest” underscores irreversibility: once a season has passed, it cannot be recovered in the same living form. The counsel to “leave the rest” to a “good angel” suggests a relinquishing of anxious control—trusting providence, fate, or the future—while focusing on what is presently available. Overall, the lines function as a memento of transience and a gentle carpe diem: time will instruct through loss, so one should value the present before it becomes only memory.