Eternal love

“ When once I am dead you will know what I am to you, eternal love enshrined in song. Heaven has betrothed us to one another. You who have loved so many, and I who have loved but you alone, here we stand and take one long last look at one another. ”

“ It is ten heavens of joy, o Well-beloved, to know that thy love is unchangeable; and that these that are united to thee, by faith, in time, and immediate beholding, in eternity, shall never be disjoined from thee; but shall ever remain close locked in the arms of eternal love. ”

“ That thought of eternal being, when we refer it to God, towers above us and repels us; and when we turn it to ourselves and think of our own life as unending, there come a strangeness and an awe that is almost shrinking, over the thoughtful spirit. But when we transmute it into the thought of a love whose length is unending, then over all the shoreless, misty, melancholy sea of eternity, there gleams a light, and every wavelet flashes up into glory. ”

“ From my sad heart, which ceases then to pine;
And Hope and Joy their quenched beams relume
And gild the universe with light divine.
XII ETERNAL JOY Truth is but as the eye of God doth see;
And Love is truth, and Love hath made thee mine.
What though on earth our lives may not combine,
Love makes us one for all Eternity!
God gives us to each other, bids us be
Each other's soul's fulfilment, makes Love shine
Upon our souls as His own light divine. ”

“ Next to eternal joy, next to being forever with those we love and those who have loved us, next to that is to be wrapped in the dreamless drapery of eternal peace. Next to eternal life is eternal death. ”

“ That love seems to me, like it, infinite—eternal. I feel as if my heart overflowed to embrace the world, even as the ocean, with its bright waves of love. It is in me and around me; it is the only great and immortal feeling which I possess. ”

“ Eternity, eternity!—that is the supreme desire! The thirst of eternity is what is called love among men, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize himself in him. Nothing is real that is not eternal. ”

“ If it is possible to imagine some world where love in pure essence seeking its source immortal is one, it may be believed that the love of these two women, so strangely different in character and circumstances, may, at last united, heal his wounds and draw him forever to the heart of the Beautiful made manifest in each of them. For Love is eternal, and who shall judge his way in the deep waters? ”

“ You'll have the love that enfolds one's whole being—the love that is eternal. Yes, dear—eternal. The mariner has his compass, the astronomer his stars, the Swiss peasant has his Alps—and we have our love. It must mean all those eternal things to us. ”

“ Came like a love-song, as, with arms entwining,
Our hearts were mixed in unison supreme.
The wind lay spell-bound in each pillared pine,
The tasselled larches had no sound or motion,
As my whole life was sinking into thine—
Sinking into a deep, unfathomed ocean
Of infinite love—uncircumscribed, divine.
Night held her breath, it seemed, with all her stars:
Eternal eyes that watched in mute compassion
Our little lives o'erleap their mortal bars,
Fused in the fulness of immortal passion,
A passion as immortal as the stars. ”

“ And they shall breathe my memory, and mine only,
Startling thy soul with hopes no longer fair,
And love that will but rise to leave thee lonely.
Immortal is the gift that I inherit:—
Eternal is the loveliness of verse ”

“ She thought of happiness eternal with the chosen of her heart--of joy, and peace, and sweet communion with the spirit of her husband, in that union which could know no change, and never see an end. It might be hard to cast off all the tender bonds of mortal affection, to give away the love and bliss we know even for the promises of eternity. ”

“ He had never been in a church nor heard one word in the Bible, and yet, with a far-away light in his eyes, he used to talk of immortality and infinite love. "Love is everlasting life," he would say, "love is eternal." ”

“ It is love that reveals to us the eternal in us and in our neighbours.
Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the beautiful, the eternal, in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity, a creation of love? ”

“ Love is, indeed, not merely a joy of eternal life: it is THE joy of eternal life!—its particular joy—a dim shadow of which we sometimes feel in this—pure, lasting, comparatively perfect, the more it approaches, in its performances and its desires, the divine essence, of which it is so poor a likeness. ”

“ We have need of the infinite to answer to the immensity of our desires; in the presence of those we love, have we no need of the Eternal that we may lean our hearts on Him? Will not all human love become a source of torment, if we have no faith in the love of Him who will stamp holy affections with the seal of His own eternity? ”

“ Surely it is a proof of the divinity of love that in and for a moment it lifts the veil of so-called reality and shows each to the other mysteriously perfect and inspiring as the world will never see them, but as they exist in the Eternal, and in the sight of those who have learnt that the material is but the dream, and the vision of love the truth. ”

“ But what is love, what is loss, what defilement even, what are pains, and hopes, and disappointments, what sorrow, and death, and all the ills that flesh is heir to, but means to this very end, to this waking of the soul to seek the home of our being—the life eternal? ”

“ Do you feel that you have lost your way in life? Then God himself will show you your way. Are you utterly helpless, worn out, body and soul? Then God’s eternal love is ready and willing to help you up, and revive you. Are you wearied with doubts and terrors? Then God’s eternal light is ready to show you your way; God’s eternal peace ready to give you peace. Do you feel yourself full of sins and faults? Then take heart; for God’s unchangeable will is, to take away those sins and purge you from those faults. ”

“ Eternal sweetness to those who love Thee, joy surpassing all joy and all desire, salvation and hope of all sinners, Thou Who hast proved that Thou hast no greater desire than to be amongst men even to assuming human nature during the course of time for love of men, recall all the sufferings that Thou hast endured from the first moment of Thy conception, and especially during Thy Passion, as it was decreed and ordained from all eternity in the Divine plan. ”

“ Now this instinct, which is so universal, is intended, I believe, to have its final and full development in God. He is the Source and Essence of all beauty. All the beautiful things that surround us here are but glimmerings of the Eternal Loveliness. These beautiful things educate and develop our taste for the final and full fruition of the very beauty of God. ”

“ This, indeed, is Life. How foolish then to think only of eternal Life as though it began at the grave. This Life that is, is the eternal Life. Eternity is to-day. The man and woman who mate in love fulfill thus the eternal law of Life, and, in their children, conceived and born in Love, do they know and do the will of God, even as do all things that are alive.
Life and Love are one.
The man had been at his boyhood home but three days when the neighbor, who lived next door, told him that his childhood playmate was coming, with her aunt, to visit their old home for a few weeks. ”

“ For the love which God bears to the soul, his eternal, never-ceasing desire to enter into it, dwell in it, stays no longer, than till the door of the heart opens for him. For nothing can keep God out of the soul, or hinder his union with it, but the desire of the heart turned from him. ”

“ True Marriage looks to what is Eternal.
They who are in love that is truly conjugial look to what is eternal, because there is eternity in that love. And its eternity is from the fact that love increases with the wife and wisdom with the husband to eternity; and in this increase or progression the married pair enter more and more interiorly into the blessednesses of heaven, which their wisdom and love of it together have in store within them. ”

“ The devotions then to angels and saints as little interfered with the incommunicable glory of the Eternal, as the love which we bear our friends and relations, our tender human sympathies, are inconsistent with that supreme homage of the heart to the Unseen, which really does but sanctify and exalt what is of earth. ”

“ Are these few fleeting years, and circumstances which we had little or no hand in forming, charged with such eternal possibilities? Yet we profess to believe that God rules, and that He loves every one of His creatures with an everlasting love! ”

“ Meantime continue to love me, and that will work miracles. It will make all the slings and slurs of life seem to be a long way off and of no account. Only those who love can know this law of the human heart, but how true it is and how beautiful! ”

“ There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine. ”

“ Eternal Love doth keep
In his complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep. ”

“ Love, He has made us one for our immortal happiness. Our souls crave and constantly pray for eternal loving companionship. You are mine, for you and 37I, dear, were in embryo in a globe of light, blended in harmony, and kept together by magnetism for our own protection; until the angels were sure our souls were perfect and would be immortal. Our immortality is very expensive, let us prize it and be grateful, prayerful and always happy. After our souls become very sensitive, strong, and highly magnetized, we are carried to earth and become human for the first time. ”

“ For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which spring hope and consolation. ”

“ Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
20Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life! ”

“ This, then, is eternal life; a life of everlasting love showing itself in everlasting good works; and whosoever lives that life, he lives the life of God, and hath eternal life. ”

“ If Heaven would hear my prayer. I'd beg with prayers and sighs That never a tear might flow From out thy lovely eyes, If Heaven might grant it so; Mine be the tears and sighs. No cloud thy brow should cover, But smiles each other chase From lips to eyes all over Thy sweet and sunny face; The clouds my heart should cover. That all thy path be light Let darkness fall on me; If all thy days be bright, Mine black as night could be. My love would light my night. For thou art more than life, And if our fate should set Life and my love at strife, How could I then forget I love thee more than life? ”

“ Would you but seal my last breath with your kiss,
I would relinquish life without one sigh.
As others long to live I'd long to die,
If loving you could any virtue prove
My heart were sure of Heaven—a Heaven of love! ”

“ The enduring passions flash like the lightning; they scorch the soul, but it is warmed forever! Miserable the creature whose love rises by degrees upon the frigid morning of the mind! Amid the gloom and sorrow of existence, suddenly to behold a form having a kindred soul, and to feel an overwhelming conviction that, with that form, our destiny must be forever entwined; that there is no more joy but in his joy, no sorrow but when he grieves; that in the warmth of his love, in his smile of fondness, is all future bliss—this is love. Magnificent, sublime, divine sentiment! ”

“ I can believe that somewhere beyond the star-filled spaces, when this arc of mortal life merges into the perfect circle of eternity, there will be no barrier between you and me, because, if God is love, love must be God, and He has no limitations. ”

“ He Who endured pain can understand our pains, and He Who redeemed sin can understand and be gentle to our sins, for His is the true Love Eternal. So go forward with faith and gladness, and in the joy of that new world and of the lost which is found again, think sometimes of the old Pasteur who hopes soon to join you there.”
Then he shrove and blessed him.
After this Godfrey slept awhile to wake elsewhere in the Land of that Love Eternal which the soul of Isobel foreknew. ”

“ If we are so happy as at last to arrive at heaven, and some reproving seraph at its gate, should ask why we came mourning or repining along our pilgrim-path, and assure us that the dispositions of that blessed clime ought to have been cultivated below, that joy and praise were the elements of its atmosphere, how earnestly should we wish that the whole of our life had been a preparation for that Eternity of love, and that we had travelled thither with a countenance always radiant, "an everlasting hymn within our souls." ”

“ Abroad Thy healing influence shower,
O’er all the nations let it flow.
Inflame our hearts with perfect love;
In us the work of faith fulfill,
So not Heav’n’s host shall swifter move
Than we on earth, to do Thy will. ”