What greater thing is there for two human souls, than…

The sentence comes at the end of chapter 54 of Adam Bede, “The Meeting on the Hill”. Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher, has gone away rather than face her love for Adam; he follows her, and comes up behind her on the hill. She turns, and “What a look of yearning love it was that the mild grey eyes turned on the strong dark-eyed man!” Dinah speaks first: “it is the Divine Will. My soul is so knit to yours that it is but a divided life I live without you.” Adam answers: “Then we’ll never part any more, Dinah, till death parts us.” They kiss, and the chapter closes with the narrator’s question, which goes on to “minister to each other in all pain” and to the moment of the last parting.

Adam Bede, published in 1859, was the first novel of Mary Ann Evans under the name George Eliot, and made it famous.

The passage has become a favourite reading at weddings, where its final words, on the last parting, are sometimes left out.

Adam Bede, chapter 54, 1859

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work