and monarchies? Will the threatened invasion of northern barbarians have taken place? Will England also have received her coup-de-grâce? Shall we have experimented with a Commune? Will our great poet have been born? The Church have been reformed? Rome rebuilt? Will there be any armies in those days? And we—what standing shall we have in our village or town? What shall we have done? How shall we have lived?
Ah, whatever has happened, whatever fate awaits us, if we have worked, and loved, and believed—then, when we sit at sunset in the big arm-chair on the terrace, and think of our families, of our friends, of the mountains, of the carnivals, of the Tyrrhenian islands that we dreamed of in our college days, we shall be sad, indeed, at the thought of parting before long from such dear souls and from so beautiful a country; but our faces will brighten with a smile serene and quiet as the dawn of a new youth, and tempering the bitterness of farewell with the tacit pledge of reunion.
