Affection is responsible for nine tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
We object not to the narration of the deeds of our unregenerate condition, but to the mode in which it is too often done. Let sin have its monument, but let it be a heap of stones cast by the hands of execration not a mausoleum erected by the hands of affection.
We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother but... when she became our child, the affection came.
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.