Death reaps the harvest of life, and every day and every hour asks for a new prey of life, and sternly tears us asunder.
How many fair names he has already snatched away from the living, and how many voiceless lyres hang on young cypresses!
How many companions are no more, how many younger ones have passed, whose morning dawned when the sultry midday burnt us!
But we have remained, have survived that fateful carnage; but we are impoverished after the death of our near ones, and no longer strive for life as for a conflict.
Sadly finishing our days, we are waiting for the belated relief, — slowly dying from day to day, until we shall be no more.
Sons of another generation, we are a last year's flower in the new: the impressions of the living are foreign to us, and they have no sympathy for ours.
They care not for that which we love, and their passions do not agitate us! They were not there where we have been, and not for us is where they shall be!
Our world is an empty fane to them, our past is but a myth, and that which for us are hallowed ashes, to them is but mute dust.
Yes! We are like ruins, and we stand on the crossroad of the living, like mortuary monuments amidst the habitations of men!