What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

Consequences are unpitying.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.