Quotes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness.

And now I will tell you. It is nearly two years ago since I have known Mr. Browning. Mr. Kenyon wished to bring him to see me five years ago, as one of the lions of London who roared the gentlest and was best worth my knowing; but I refused then, in my blind dislike to seeing strangers.

We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book And calculating profits - so much help By so much rending. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth - 'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

We live on just in the same way, having very few visitors, and receiving them in the quietest of hospitalities.

A mirror may be held in different lights by different hands; and, according to the position of those hands, will the light fall.

As the green summer comes on you must be the better surely; if you can bear to lie out under the trees, the general health will rally and the local injury correct itself.

The French people are very democratical in their tendencies, but they must have a visible type of hero-worship, and they find it in the bearer of that name Napoleon. That name is the only tradition dear to them, and it is deeply dear. That a man bearing it, and appealing at the same time to the whole people upon democratical principles, should be answered from the heart of the people, should neither astonish, nor shame, nor enrage anybody.

He was the best and kindest all that time, as even he could be, and carried the kettle when it was too heavy for me, and helped me with heart and head.

Thank you for the sympathy and interest which you have extended towards us in our heavy affliction. Even you cannot know all that we have lost; but God knows, and it has pleased Him to take away the blessing that He gave. And all must be right since He doeth all! Indeed we did not foresee this great grief! If we had we could not have felt it less; but I should not then have been denied the consolation of being with her at the last.

Our Balzac should be flattered beyond measure by my thinking of him at all. Which I did, but of you more.

Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, still better known to the world as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was born on March 6, 1806, the eldest child of Edward and Mary Moulton Barrett

Did you ever read Bulwer's 'Eva, or the Unhappy Marriage'?

I will write my story for my better self.

I would have the government educate the people absolutely, and then give room for the individual to develop himself into life freely. Nothing can be more hateful to me than this communist idea of quenching individualities in the mass.

Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Can ye listen in your silence? Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands, With a wind that evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore? Pan, Pan is dead.

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?

Flush was a fellow traveller of course, and enjoyed it in the most obviously amusing manner. Never was there so good a dog in a carriage before his time! Think of Flush, too! He has a supreme contempt for trees and hills or anything of that kind, and, in the intervals of natural scenery, he drew in his head from the window and didn't consider it worth looking at; but when the population thickened, and when a village or a town was to be passed through

For my part, however imperfect my practice may be, I am intimately convinced — and more and more since my long seclusion — that to live in a house with windows on every side, so as to catch both the morning and evening sunshine, is the best and brightest thing we have to do — to say nothing about the justest and wisest. Sympathies are our opportunities of good.

The only time I met R.B. clandestinely was in the parish church, where we were married before two witnesses — it was the first and only time. I looked, he says, more dead than alive, and can well believe it, for I all but fainted on the way, and had to stop for sal volatile at a chemist's shop.

How glad I shall be if it is true that Tennyson is married! I believe in the happiness of marriage, for men especially.

if some natures have to be refined by the sun, & some by the furnace (the less genial ones--) both means are to be recognized as good; . . . however different in pleasurableness & painfulness, & tho' furnace-fire leaves scorched streaks upon the fruit--.

By the last American packet I had two letters, one from a poet of Massachusetts, and another from a poetess: the he, Mr. Lowell, and the she, Mrs. Sigourney. She says that the sound of my poetry is stirring the 'deep green forests of the New World;' which sounds pleasantly, does it not?

Neglectful that I am, I forgot to tell you before that you heard quite rightly about Mr. Thackeray's wife, who is ill so. Since your question, I had in gossip from England that the book 'Jane Eyre' was written by a governess in his house, and that the preface to the foreign edition refers to him in some marked way. We have not seen the book at all.

The correspondence, thus arranged in chronological order, forms an almost continuous record of Mrs. Browning's life, from the early days in Herefordshire to her death in Italy in 1861; but in order to complete the record, it has been thought well to add connecting links of narrative, which should serve to bind the whole together into the unity of a biography.