Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude...

Oh may I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again / In minds made better by their presence.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us