The eyes which had brightened his youth (and which he saw in his dreams and thoughts for faithful years afterwards, as though they looked at him out of heaven) seemed to shine upon him after five-and-thirty years.

He remembered such a fair bending neck and clustering hair, such a light foot and airy figure, such a slim hand lying in his own--and now parted from it with a gap of ten thousand long days between.

It is an old saying, that we forget nothing; as people in fever begin suddenly to talk the language of their infancy we are stricken by memory sometimes, and old affections rush back on us as vivid as in the time when they were our daily talk, when their presence gladdened our eyes, when their accents thrilled in our ears, when with passionate tears and grief we flung ourselves upon their hopeless corpses.

Parting is death, at least as far as life is concerned.

A passion comes to an end; it is carried off in a coffin, or weeping in a post-chaise; it drops out of life one way or other, and the earthclods close over it, and we see it no more.
But it has been part of our souls, and it is eternal.