Well, Leopardi's case was not his. It was true, what he had said to Chide. With all drawbacks, he had enjoyed his life, had found it abundantly worth living.
And, after all, was not Leopardi himself a witness to the life he rejected, to the Nature he denounced. Ferrier recalled his cry to his brother: "Love me, Carlo, for God's sake! I need love, love, love!--fire, enthusiasm, life."
"Fire, enthusiasm, life." Does the human lot contain these things, or no? If it does, have the gods mocked us, after all?
Pondering these great words, Ferrier strolled homeward, while the outpouring of the evening splendor died from Perusia Augusta, and the mountains sank deeper into the gold and purple of the twilight.
As for love, he had missed it long ago. But existence was still rich, still full of savor, so long as a man's will held his grip on men and circumstance.
All action, he thought, is the climbing of a precipice, upheld above infinity by one slender sustaining rope. Call it what we like--will, faith, ambition, the wish to live--in the end it fails us all. And in that moment, when we begin to imagine how and when it may fail us, we hear, across the sea of time, the first phantom tolling of the funeral bell.
There were times now when he seemed to feel the cold approaching breath of such a moment. But they were still invariably succeeded by a passionate recoil of life and energy. By the time he reached the hotel he was once more plunged in all the preoccupations, the schemes, the pugnacities of the party leader.
A month later, on an evening toward the end of June, Dr. Roughsedge, lying reading in the shade of his little garden, saw his wife approaching. He raised himself with alacrity.
"You've seen her?"