which most lacerate the other’s heart and keep it in martyrdom.” But they understand, at least the hero does; and he formulates for his companion the essence of their _impasse_. It is not her fault when she tears and rends. Each human soul carries in it for love but a determinate quantity of sensitive force. It is inevitable that this quantity should use itself up with time, as everything else does; so that when it _is_ used up no effort has power to prevent love from ceasing. Now it’s a long time that you have been loving me; nearly two years! The young man’s intelligence is of the clearest; the woman’s here is inferior, though in “Il Fuoco” the two opposed faculties are almost equal; but the pair are alike far from living in their intelligence, which only serves to bestrew with lurid gleams the black darkness of their sensual life. So far as the intelligence is one with the will our author fundamentally treats it as cut off from all communication with any other quarter—that is with the senses arrayed and encamped. The most his unfortunates arrive at is to carry their extremely embellished minds with them through these dusky passages as a kind of gilded glimmering lantern, the effect of which is merely fantastic and ironic—a thing to make the play of their shadows over the walls of their catacomb more monstrous and sinister. Again in the first pages of “Il Trionfo” the glimmer is given. He recognised the injustice of any resentment against her, because he recognised the fatal necessities that controlled them alike. No, his misery came from no other human creature; it came from the very essence of life. The lover had not the lover to complain of, but simply love itself. Love, toward which his whole being reached out, from within, with a rush not to be checked, love was of all the sad things of this earth the most lamentably sad. And to this supreme sadness he was perhaps condemned till death.