The
octet was finished and the first two lines of the sestet. He would never
finish it now. It had no longer any reason to be; for it was a cry
to ears which were now deaf, a question, an appeal, which demanded an
answering smile, a consenting echo; and the lips, the only lips which
could frame that answer, were dumb. He remembered that Casella, the
musician, had asked him a week ago for the text of a _canzone_ which
he had repeated to him one day. He had promised to let him have it.
The promise had entirely gone out of his mind. Then he reflected that
because the ship of his hopes and dreams had been wrecked there was no
reason why he should neglect his obligations to his fellow-travellers on
the uncertain sea.
He sat down and transcribed by the light of the dawn in his exquisite
handwriting the stanzas which had been the fruit of a brighter day. And
the memory of this dead joy was exceedingly bitter to him, so that he
sat musing for some time on the unutterable sadness which the ghosts of
perished joys bring to man in his misery, and a line of Virgil buzzed
in his brain; but not, as of yore, did it afford him the luxury of
causeless melancholy, but like a cruel finger it touched his open wound.
The ancients, he thought, knew how to bear misfortune.
Levius fit patientia
Quidquid corrigere est nefas.
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