Let us keep to generalities. Looking broadly at our experience, I should say that the misfortune of the gods, as a preparation for their mortality, was that in their deathless state the affections fell at the foot of the tree, like these withered leaves. We should have fastened the branches of life together in long elastic wires of the thin-drawn gold of perdurable sentiment.
Ares.
The rapture, the violence, the hammering pulse, the bursting heart,—I see no resemblance between these and the leaves that flutter at our feet.
Aphrodite.
These leaves had their moment of vitality, when the sap rushed through their veins, when their tissue was like a ripple of sparkling emerald on the face of the smiling sky. But they could not preserve their glow, and they are the more hopelessly dead now, because they burned in their green fire so fiercely.
Ares.
We felt no shadow of coming disability strike across our pleasures.
Aphrodite.
No; but that was precisely what made our immortality such an ill preparation for