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Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out,--I stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends.

My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you.

The partners, and the clerks, with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely associated--being suddenly removed from them--they seemed as dead to me.

For the fourth time the officer elected by the people and ordained by the Constitution to fill a vacancy so created is called to assume the Executive chair.

Men may die, but the fabrics of our free institutions remain unshaken.

The wisdom of our fathers, foreseeing even the most dire possibilities, made sure that the Government should never be imperiled because of the uncertainty of human life.

Fear proceeds from the same things when absent which occasion grief when present.

Supposing, then, each separate misfortune to occasion a separate additional grief, the whole would be too great to be supportable.

The third is, that it is folly to wear one's self out with grief which can avail nothing.

Affected of course I am by the loss of a friend as I think there will never be again, such as I can fearlessly say there never was before.

In such cases friendships should be allowed to die out gradually by an intermission of intercourse.

it was the virtue of the man that I loved, and that has not suffered death

Presently, after this was at an end, my mother died, and I was left at liberty to mourn her loss awhile.

The affectionate heart of my aunt, Catherine Porten, bewailed a sister and a friend; but my poor father was inconsolable, and the transport of grief seemed to threaten his life or his reason.

If sorrow in its reaction makes us think of our friends, let my name come among the list of yours to you, and with it let the thought come that I am not the coldest and least sincere.

In our sorrow we see the rough side of the stuff; in our joys the smooth; and who shall say that when the taffeta is turned the most silk may not be in the sorrows?

Once I wished not to live, but the faculty of life seems to have sprung up in me again, from under the crushing foot of heavy grief.

The unity of God preserves a unity in men--that is, a perpetual sympathy between man and man--which sympathy we must be subject to, if not in our joys, yet in our griefs.

There is only one event in my life which never loses its bitterness; which comes back on me like a retreating wave, going and coming again, which was and is my grief--I never had but one brother who loved and comprehended me.

When gone from hence, may nobody think of me again, except when one or two may think perhaps how I loved them

He did not know how long he sat there or what was happening to him, but at last he moved as if he were awakening and he got up slowly and stood on the moss carpet, drawing a long, deep, soft breath and wondering at himself. Something seemed to have been unbound and released in him, very quietly.

You have summoned me in my weakness; you must sustain me by your strength.

Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart

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?