The joy of meeting pays the pangs of absence; else who could bear it?

Rowe’s line frames separation and reunion as a moral and emotional economy: absence inflicts real pain, but the anticipated “joy of meeting” compensates for it, making love and friendship endurable across distance and time. The rhetorical question (“else who could bear it?”) suggests that without the promise of reunion, human attachment would be psychologically unsustainable. The sentiment also implies that longing is not merely a cost but part of what intensifies the value of return—reunion feels precious precisely because absence hurts. In this way, the quote captures a classic early‑modern theme: constancy tested by distance, with hope and memory acting as the bridge.