What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
George Eliot · Adam Bede
Love & longing
“What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel…”
- Author
- George Eliot
- Work
- Adam Bede
- Year
- 1859
- Chapter / part
- Chapter LIV: The Meeting on the Hill
- Length
- 57 words
- Source
- Project Gutenberg eBook #507
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. George Eliot died in 1880, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1859. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
Related passages
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and ideal Grace.I love thee to the level of everyday’sMost quiet need, by sun and candlelight.I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.I love thee with the passion put to useIn my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.I love thee with a love I seemed to loseWith my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett BrowningSonnets from the Portuguese, 1850 · Sonnet XLIII
Passage page · Read the full text
Passage page · Read the full text
Time isToo Slow for those who Wait,Too Swift for those who Fear,Too Long for those who Grieve,Too Short for those who Rejoice;But for those who Love,Time is not.
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
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