No! I shall love thee still, when death itself is past.

XXXI.

“Half could I bear, methinks, to leave this earth,—

And thee, more loved than aught beneath the sun,

If I had lived to smile but on the birth

Of one dear pledge;—but shall there then be none,

In future times—no gentle little one,

To clasp thy neck, and look, resembling me?

Yet seems it, e’en while life’s last pulses run,

A sweetness in the cup of death to be,