Elizabeth Barrett Browning Famous Quotes
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You were made perfectly to be loved and surely I have loved you in the idea of you my whole life long.
I heard an angel speak last night/And he said, "Write!"
New angel mine, unhoped for in the world!
How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort, in a hospital.
Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.
And that dismal cry rose slowly And sank slowly through the air, Full of spirit's melancholy And eternity's despair; And they heard the words it said,- "Pan is dead! great Pan is dead! Pan, Pan is dead!"
I begin to think that none are so bold as the timid, when they are fairly roused.
I would confide to you perhaps my secret profession of faith - which is ... which is ... that let us say and do what we please and can ... there is a natural inferiority of mind in women - of the intellect ... not by any means, of the moral nature - and that the history of Art and of genius testifies to this fact openly.
Italy/Is one thing, England one.
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all ...
Beloved, let us live so well our work shall still be better for our love, and still our love be sweeter for our work.
His ears were often the first thing to catch my tears.
Why, conquering
May prove as lordly and complete a thing
In lifting upward, as in crushing low!
And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword
To one who lifts him from the bloody earth,
Even so, Belovëd, I at last record,
Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth,
I rise above abasement at the word.
Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth!
God keeps a niche
In Heaven, to hold our idols; and albeit
He brake them to our faces, and denied
That our close kisses should impair their white,
I know we shall behold them raised, complete,
The dust swept from their beauty, glorified,
New Memnons singing in the great God-light.
The growing drama has outgrown such toys Of simulated stature, face, and speech: It also peradventure may outgrow The simulation of the painted scene, Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume, And take for a worthier stage the soul itself, Its shifting fancies and celestial lights, With all its grand orchestral silences To keep the pauses of its rhythmic sounds.
And friends, dear friends,
when it shall be That this low breath is gone from me, And gone my bier ye come to weep, Let One, most loving of you all, Say, Not a tear must o'er her fall; He giveth His beloved sleep.
There are nettles everywhere, but smooth, green grasses are more common still; the blue of heaven is larger than the cloud.
Pray, pray, thou who also weepest,
And the drops will slacken so; Weep, weep
and the watch thou keepest, With a quicker count will go. Think,
the shadow on the dial For the nature most undone, Marks the passing of the trial, Proves the presence of the sun.
I have done most of my talking by post of late years
as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.
This race is never grateful: from the first, One fills their cup at supper with pure wine, Which back they give at cross-time on a sponge, In bitter vinegar.
Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large,
where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!
Some people always sigh in thanking God.
When we first met and loved, I did not build Upon the event with marble ...
The picture of helpless indolence she calls herself
sublimely helpless and impotent
I had done living I thought
Was ever life so like death before? My face was so close against the tombstones,
that there seemed no room for tears.
For none can express thee, though all should approve thee.
I love thee so, Dear, that I only can love thee.
If we tried To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure The future would not stand.
My patience has dreadful chilblains from standing so long on a monument.
XI
I sang his name instead of song;
Over and over I sang his name:
Backward and forward I sang it along,
With my sweetest notes, it was still the same!
I sang it low, that the slave-girls near
Might never guess, from what they could hear,
That all the song was a name.
Love doesn't make the world go round, Love is what makes the ride worthwhile!
Yet how proud we are,
In daring to look down upon ourselves!
But so fair, She takes the breath of men away Who gaze upon her unaware.
The essence of all beauty, I call love.
My future will not copy my fair past, I wrote that once. And, thinking at my side my ministering life-angel justified the word by his appealing look upcast to the white throne of God.
She lived, we'll say,
A harmless life, she called a
virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all
(But that she had not lived enough to know)
May the good God pardon all good men.
I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.
I think of thee!-my thoughts do twine and bud
About thee, as wild vines, about a tree ...
Yet, O my palm-tree, be it understood
I will not have my thoughts instead of thee
Who art dearer, better!
The Holy Night We sate among the stalls at Bethlehem; The dumb kine from their fodder turning them, Softened their horned faces To almost human gazes Toward the newly Born: The simple shepherds from the star-lit brooks Brought visionary looks, As yet in their astonied hearing rung The strange sweet angel-tongue: The magi of the East, in sandals worn, Knelt reverent, sweeping round, With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground, The incense, myrrh, and gold These baby hands were impotent to hold: So let all earthlies and celestials wait Upon thy royal state. Sleep, sleep, my kingly One!
The wisest word man reaches is the humblest he can speak.
Definition of Love: A score of zero in tennis. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears of all my life.
Learn to win a lady's faith
Nobly, as the thing is high;
Bravely as for life and death -
With a loyal gravity.
Lead her from the festive boards,
Point her to the starry skies,
Guard her, by your truthful words,
Pure from courtship's flatteries.
Experience, like a pale musician, holds a dulcimer of patience in his hand.
Unless you can muse in a crowd all day On the absent face that fixed you; Unless you can love, as the angels may, With the breadth of heaven betwixt you; Unless you can dream that his faith is fast, Through behoving and unbehoving; Unless you can die when the dream is past - Oh, never call it loving!
The chances are that, being a woman, young,
And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes,
You write as well ... and ill ... upon the whole,
As other women. If as well, what then?
If even a little better,..still, what then?
We want the Best in art now, or no art. (L144-149)
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
Men of science, osteologists And surgeons, beat some poets, in respect For nature,-count nought common or unclean, Spend raptures upon perfect specimens Of indurated veins, distorted joints, Or beautiful new cases of curved spine; While we, we are shocked at nature's falling off, We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains.
The critics say that epics have died out with Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods; I'll not believe it. I could never deem as Payne Knight did, that Homer's heroes measured twelve feet high. They were but men: -his Helen's hair turned grey like any plain Miss Smith's who wears a front; And Hector's infant whimpered at a plume as yours last Friday at a turkey-cock. All heroes are essential men, and all men possible heroes: every age, heroic in proportions, double faced, looks backward and before, expects a morn and claims an epos.
A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it,
prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, A woman's function plainly is ... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.
Souls are gregarious in a sense, but no soul touches another, as a general rule.
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string
And let them drop down on my knee to-night.
This said,
he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,
Yet I wept for it!
this, ... the paper's light ...
Said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailed
As if God's future thundered on my past.
This said, I am thine
and so its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beat too fast.
And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of they soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me ...
For me, my heart, that erst did go
Most like a tired child at a show,
That sees through tears the mummers leap,
Would now its wearied vision close,
Would childlike on His love repose,
Who giveth His Beloved, sleep.
Earth's crammed with Heaven.
Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me ... -toll
The silver iterance!
O Life,
How oft we throw it off and think, - 'Enough,
Enough of life in so much! - here's a cause
For rupture; - herein we must break with Life,
Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!'
- And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended. - Then, Life calls to us
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,
Above us, or below us, or around .
Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's,
Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed
To own our compensations than our griefs:
Still, Life's voice! - still, we make our peace with Life.
I cannot speak in happy tones.
The exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most princely thing!
For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.
An ignorance of means may minister to greatness, but an ignorance of aims make it impossible to be great at all.
But since he had The genius to be loved, why let him have The justice to be honoured in his grave.
Unless you can feel when the song is done
No other is sweet in its rhythm;
Unless you can feel when left by one
That all men else go with him.
In this abundant earth no doubt Is little room for things worn out: Disdain them, break them, throw them by! And if before the days grew rough We once were lov'd, us'd
well enough, I think, we've far'd, my heart and I.
I love you for the part of me that you bring out.
With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.
I work with patience, which is almost power.
I only thought
Of lying quiet there where I was thrown
Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her
To prick me to a pattern with her pin,
Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,
And dry out from my drowned anatomy
The last sea-salt left in me.
I shall but love thee bitter after death
And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.
Two human loves make one divine.
Sleep on, Baby, on the floor, Tired of all the playing, Sleep with smile the sweeter for That you dropped away in! On your curls' full roundness stand Golden lights serenely
One cheek, pushed out by the hand, Folds the dimple inly.
How joyously the young sea-mew
Lay dreaming on the waters blue,
Whereon our little bark had thrown
A little shade, the only one;
But shadows ever man pursue.
Yes, I answered you last night; No, this morning, sir, I say: Colors seen by candle-light Will not look the same by day.
Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning:
Would she have lost the poet's fire for the anguish of the burning?
The minstrel harp, for the strained string? tripod for the afflated
Woe, or the vision, for those tears in which it shone dilated?
Books succeed; and lives fail.
Children use the fist until they are of age to use the brain.
The least flower, with brimming cup, may stand and share its dew drop with another near.
Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And life is perfected by death.
Death forerunneth Love to win "Sweetest eyes were ever seen."
You believe
In God, for your part?
that He who makes
Can make good things from ill things, best from worst,
As men plant tulips upon dunghills when
They wish them finest.
Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe, - but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully.
There, that is our secret: go to sleep! You will wake, and remember, and understand.
I take her as God made her, and as men Must fail to unmake her, for my honoured wife.
Truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.
Nosegays! leave them for the waking,
Throw them earthward where they grew
Dim are such, beside the breaking
Amaranths he looks unto.
Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.
Good aims not always make good books.
I would not be a rose upon the wall
A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,
To say to a courtier, "Pluck that rose for me,
It's prettier than the rest." O Romney Leigh!
I'd rather far be trodden by his foot,
Than lie in a great queen's bosom.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
And if God choose
I shall but love thee better after death.
The flower-girl's prayer to buy roses and pinks, held out in the smoke, like stars by day.
Whatever's lost, it first was won.
I worked with patience which means almost power.
And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.
"There is no God," the foolish saith, But none, "There is no sorrow." And nature oft the cry of faith In bitter need will borrow: Eyes which the preacher could not school, By wayside graves are raised; And lips say, "God be pitiful," Who ne'er said, "God be praised."
A woman's pity sometimes makes her mad.
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
He lives most life whoever breathes most air.
The English have a scornful insular way Of calling the French light.
Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.