Could’st thou but feel, thy tears would flow
In yearning love and grief, without control.
Aye, homesick tears for eastern groves
That shade Euphrates; but the tree
Forgets; and I, compelled to flee
By hate, almost forget my former loves.
When one reads these impassioned verses, one recalls the touching lines of the poet Juvenal who, in his exile in Dyene, wrote:
Mollissima corda
Humano generi dare se Natura fatetur
Quæ lacrymas dedit; hæc nostri pars optima sensus.[488]