There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.

How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long - the care of cares - the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven - and straight you find a new stratum there.

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.

There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.

Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.

I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.