—ceu veritus turbare Vopisci
Pieriosque dies et habentes carmina somnos.
XXXIV.
His own dim consciousness should teach him thus much, that Life will never be extinguished. Else all here is but dust and ashes. The earth, “this round of green,” and sun, “this orb of flame,” are but “fantastic beauty”—such as a wild Poet might invent, who has neither conscience nor aim.
Even God can be nothing to the writer, if all around him is doomed to perish; and he will not himself wait in patience, but rather “sink to peace;” and, like the birds that are charmed by the serpent[25] into its mouth, he will “drop head-foremost in the jaws of vacant darkness,” and so cease to exist.
XXXV.
And yet, if a trustworthy voice from the grave should testify, that there is no life beyond this world; even then he would endeavour to keep alive so sweet a thing as Love, during the brief span of mortal existence.
But still there would come
“The moanings of the homeless sea,”
and the sound of streams disintegrating and washing down the rocks to form future land surfaces—“Æonian hills,” the formations of whole æons being thus dissolved—and Love itself would languish under
“The sound of that forgetful shore,”