XV

Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of pain,

If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain,

And the homeless planet at length will be wheel'd thro' the silence of space,

Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race,

When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last brother-worm will have fled

From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth that is dead?