But fate ordains that dearest friends must part.

The line expresses a stoic, almost resigned recognition that separation is an inescapable condition of human attachment. By attributing parting to “fate,” Young frames loss not as a personal failure or a contingent accident but as something woven into the order of life itself: even the “dearest” bonds are subject to time, mortality, distance, and circumstance. The poignancy comes from the contrast between intimacy (“dearest friends”) and inevitability (“must part”), suggesting that affection does not exempt anyone from change. In Young’s moral-poetic idiom, the thought often functions as a memento of transience, pressing readers to value friendship while it lasts and to cultivate inner resources for enduring inevitable bereavement.