Chapter XXXV

And yet, if a trustworthy voice from the grave should testify, that there is no life beyond this world; even then he would endeavour to keep alive so sweet a thing as Love, during the brief span of mortal existence.

But still there would come

"The moanings of the homeless sea,"

and the sound of streams disintegrating and washing down the rocks to form future land surfaces--"AEonian hills," the formations of whole aeons being thus dissolved--and Love itself would languish under

"The sound of that forgetful shore,"

those new lands in which all things are obliterated and forgotten--knowing that its own death was impending.

But the case is idly put. If such extinguishing Death were from the first seen as it is when it comes, Love would either not exist; or else would be a mere fellowship of coarse appetites, like those of the Satyr, who crushes the grape for drunken revelry, and basks and battens in the woods.