No! earth may not be Paradise.
I must not forget to remark, parenthetically, that the minister’s son, in order to make these lines generally useful, had provided them with a last stanza in triplicate. ‘For lovers,’ he said sagely, ‘are either in the optative mood, the desperative, or the exultative.’ This time he had used the optative. For the desperative he would substitute:
4.
The joys of life lie dead, lie dead,
The light of day is quenched in gloom;
The spark of hope my heart hath fled—
What now withholds me from the tomb?
And this was the termination exultative, as he called it:
4.
O joy! the pearl is mine again,