Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes
By anguish which made pale the sun, I hear Him charge his saints that none Among his creatures anywhere Blaspheme against Him with despair, However darkly days go on.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The heart which, like a staff, was one For mine to lean and rest upon, The strongest on the longest day With steadfast love, is caught away, And yet my days go on, go on. And cold before my summer's done, And deaf in Nature's general tune, And fallen too low for special fear, And here, with hope no longer here, While the tears drop, my days go on.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
And truly, I reiterate, . . nothing's small! No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee, But finds some coupling with the spinning stars; No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere; No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim: And, glancing on my own thin, veined wrist, In such a little tremour of the blood The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul Doth utter itself distinct. Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries, And daub their natural faces unaware More and more, from the first similitude.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Man, the two-fold creature, apprehends The two-fold manner, in and outwardly, And nothing in the world comes single to him. A mere itself, cup, column, or candlestick, All patterns of what shall be in the Mount; The whole temporal show related royally, And build up to eterne significance Through the open arms of God.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Nay, if there's room for poets in the world A little overgrown, (I think there is) Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's, this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
That he, in his developed manhood, stood A little sunburnt by the glare of life; While I . . it seemed no sun had shone on me.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Good critics, who have stamped out poets' hope, Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state, Good patriots, who for a theory risked a cause.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in't.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If I married him, I would not dare to call my soul my own, Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought And every heart-beat down there in the bill, Not one found honestly deductible From any use that pleased him!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The beautiful seems right By force of Beauty, and the feeble wrong Because of weakness.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Life, struck sharp on death, Makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love' 'Love, my child, love, love!'(then he had done with grief) 'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone, And none was left to love in all the world.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Of writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine, Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend, Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
