The children he rather avoided. They worried him with their unfeeling prattle. Yet still he lingered on. It could not last much longer; and he knew it could not. But what was to be the end?
He never doubted her love—not for one instant. He pictured her, like himself, waiting, waiting for the deliverance that would not come, for the reunion that hard fate debarred them. She would yield herself to him, she had said, when hope was gone; he had but to call and she would fly to hide herself in his breast. So it was hope that parted them; yet how was he to banish hope and still regain her? It was upon hope he lived.
Once he wove this sorrowful exaltation of his into a rhapsody of love and loss, the sense of which may be rendered in the following lines:
“Once for a thousand years ’twas Spring;
Love reigned, and Death stood still;
The world paused at its burgeoning
Of may and daffodil.
“Like buds from spiring lilies thrown,
Time blossomed over Time;
It seemed, ere yet its sweets were blown,