". . . Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow?"
He must indeed, for already he is "off again":
"Just when I seemed about to learn!"
Even the letting nature have her way is not the secret. The thread is lost again:
"The old trick! Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
No contact is close enough. The passion is infinite, the hearts are finite. The deepest love must suffer this doom of isolation: plunged as they may be in one another, body and soul, in the very rapture is the sentence. The good minute goes. It shall be theirs again—again they shall trust it, again the thread be lost: "the old trick!"
For it is the very trick of life, as here we know it. The Campagna itself says that—
"Rome's ghost since her decease."
Mutability, mutability! Though the flowers are the primal, naked forms, they are not the same flowers; though love is ever new, it is ever old. New as to-day is new: old as to-day is old; and all the lovers have discerned, like him,