Meeting is the beginning of parting.

We never know the true value of friends. While they live, we are too sensitive of their faults; when we have lost them, we only see their virtues.

Time takes them home that we loved, fair names and famous.

To the soft long sleep, to the broad sweet bosom of death;

But the flower of their souls he shall not take

away to shame us,

Nor the lips lack song for ever that now lack breath.

For with us shall the music and perfume that die not, dwell.

Though the dead to our dead bid welcome, and we farewell.

As I grow older, I set a higher value on the intimacies of my youth, and am more afflicted by whatever loses one of them to

me.

Japanese
Proverb

J. C. and
A. W.
Hare

Algernon
Charles

Swin

burne

Thomas
Jefferson

"T is sweet, as year by year we lose
Friends out of sight, in faith to muse
How grows in Paradise our store.

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it shall rejoin its friend, and

it will be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

John
Keble

Ralph
Waldo
Emerson

Thomas
Moore

Alfred Tennyson in "In Memoriam"

John Milton

Thomas Campbell "The River of Life"

Oliver Wendell Holmes

John Greenleaf Whittier

Ah! well may we hope when this short life is gone
To meet in some world of more permanent bliss;
For a smile, or a grasp of the hand, hastening on,
Is all we enjoy of each other in this.

Ah yet, ev'n yet, if this might be,

I falling on his faithful heart,

Would breathing through his lips impart
The life that almost dies in me:

That dies not, but endures with pain,
And slowly forms the firmer mind,
Treasuring the look it cannot find,
The words that are not heard again.

But oh, the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!

It may be strange; yet who would change
Time's course to slower speeding,
When one by one our friends have gone
And left our bosoms bleeding?

We who behold our autumn sun below
The Scorpion's sign, against the Archer's bow,
Know well what parting means of friend from
friend;

After the snows no freshening dews descend,
And what the frost has marred, the sunshine will
not mend.

I have friends in Spirit Land,
Not shadows in a shadowy band,
Not others, but themselves are they,
And still I think of them the same
As when the Master's summons came.

There is something very sad in the death of friends. We seem to provide for our own mortality, and to make up our minds to die. We are warned by sickness, fever and ague, and sleepless nights, and a hundred dull infirmities; but when our friends pass away, we lament them as though we had considered them immortal.

Of our great love, Parthenophil,
This little stone abideth still

Sole sign and token:

I seek thee yet, and yet shall seek,

Though faint mine eyes, my spirit weak
With prayers unspoken.

Meanwhile best friend of friends, do thou,
If this the cruel fates allow,

By death's dark river,

Among those shadowy people, drink

No drop for me on Lethe's brink:
Forget me never!

Barry
Cornwall

Epitaph
Anony-

mous

from the Greek

Each pearl that leaves that broken string

Is set in friendship's crown above.

As narrower grows the earthly chain,
Our circle widens in the sky;
These are the treasures that remain,
But those are stars that beam on high.

Holmes

Jerome

K. Jerome in "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow"

Ah me! the world grows very full of ghosts as we grow older. Every house, every room, every creaking chair has its own particular ghost. They haunt the empty chambers of our lives, they throng around us like dead leaves, whirled in the autumn wind. Some are living, some are dead. We know not. We clasped their hands once, loved them, quarreled with them, laughed with them, told them our thoughts, and hopes, and aims, as they told us theirs, till it seemed our very hearts had joined in a grip that would defy the puny power of Death. Ghosts! they are always with us, and always will be, while the sad old world keeps echoing to the sob of long good-byes, while the cruel ships sail away across the seas, and the cold green earth lies heavy on the hearts of those we love.

Shakespeare in "All's

Well

That

Ends

Well,"

Act v.

Sc. 3

Love that comes too late
Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried,
To the great sender turns a sour offence,
Crying "That's good that's gone." Our rash
faults,

Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave:
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust:
Our own love waking cries to see what's done,
While shameful hate sleeps out the afternoon.