earn."

_No_ contact is close enough. The passion is infinite, the hearts are
finite. The deepest love must suffer this doom of isolation: plunged as
they may be in one another, body and soul, in the very rapture is the
sentence. The good minute goes. It shall be theirs again--again they
shall trust it, again the thread be lost: "the old trick!"

For it is the very trick of life, as here we know it. The Campagna
itself says that--

"Rome's ghost since her decease."

Mutability, mutability! Though the flowers are the primal, naked forms,
they are not the same flowers; though love is ever new, it is ever old.
_New as to-day is new: old as to-day is old_; and all the lovers have
discerned, like him,

"Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."

For has she helped him to hold the thread? No; she too has been the
sport of "the old trick." And even of that he cannot be wholly sure:

"I _wonder_ do you feel to-day
As I have felt . . . ?"

+ + + + +

In the enchanting _Lovers' Quarrel_ we find a less metaphysical pair
than those whom we have followed in their quest. This man has not taken
her for granted, but neither has he frightened her with the mystery of
her own and his elusiveness. No; these two have just had, very humanly
and gladly, the "time of their lives"! All through the winter they have
frolicked: there never was a more enchanting love than she, and plainly
he has charmed her just as much. The same sort of fun appealed to them
both at the same moment--games out of straws of their own devising;
drawing one another's faces in the ashes of the hearth:

"Free on each other's flaws,
How we chattered like two church daws!"

And then the _Times_ would come in--and the Emperor has married his
Mlle. de Montijo!

"There they sit ermine-stoled,
And she powders her hair with gold."

Or a travel-book arrives from the library--and the two heads are close
together over the pictures.

"Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
Miles and miles of gold and green
Where the sunflowers blow
In a solid glow,
And to break now and then the screen--
Black neck and eyeballs keen,
Up a wild horse leaps between!"

. . . No picture in the book like that--what a genius he is! The book is
pushed away; and there lies the table bare:

"Try, will our table turn?
Lay your hands there light, and year