"All that is best in love"

Here follows the best description of the family that I have yet to discover:

It may be that it is a theme fitter for the poet than for sober prose; for there is hardly a subject which poets have made peculiarly their own which does not find a place within the Family. It is greater than love itself, for it includes, ennobles, makes permanent all that is best in love. The pain of life is hallowed by it, the drudgery sweetened, its pleasures consecrated. It is the great trysting-place of the generations, where past and future flash into the reality of the present. It is the great storehouse in which the hardly earned treasures of the past, the inheritance of spirit and character from our ancestors, are guarded and preserved for our descendents. And it is the great discipline through which each generation learns anew the lesson of citizenship that no man can live for himself alone.

From Helen Bosanquet's 1915 book The Family.