C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Ce Qui Dure

Translation of E. and R. E. Prothero

HOW cold and wan the present lowers,

O my true Love! around us twain;

How little of the Past is ours!

How changed the friends who yet remain.

We cannot without envying view

The eyes with twenty summers gay;

For eyes ’neath which our childhood grew

Have long since passed from earth away.

Each hour still steals our youth; alas!

No hour will e’er the theft restore:

There’s but one thing that will not pass,—

The heart I loved thee with of yore.

That heart which plays in life its part,

With love elate, with loss forlorn,

Is still—through all—the child’s pure heart

My mother gave when I was born.

That heart, where nothing new can light,

Where old thoughts draw their cherished breath,—

It loves thee, dear, with all the might

That Life can wield in strife with Death.

If it of Death the conqueror be,

If there’s in Man some nobler part

That wins him immortality,—

Then thou hast, Love! that deathless heart.