Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes - Page 9

You smell a rose through a fence: If two should smell it, what matter?

And lips say “God be pitiful,” Who ne'er said “God be praised.”

There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell.

For frequent tears have run; The colours from my life.

Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which if cut deep down the middle Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

Very whitely still The lilies of our lives may reassure Their blossoms from their roots, accessible Alone to heavenly dews that drop not fewer; Growing straight out of man's reach, on the hill. God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.

I wish I were the lily's leaf To fade upon that bosom warm, Content to wither, pale and brief, The trophy of thy paler form.

Life, struck sharp on death, Makes awful lightning.

And there my little doves did sit With feathers softly brown And glittering eyes that showed their right To general Nature's deep delight.

Purple lilies Dante blew To a larger bubble with his prophet breath.

Life treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart.

A grave, on which to rest from singing?

O, brothers! let us leave the shame and sin Of taking vainly in a plaintive mood, The holy name of Grief--holy herein, That, by the grief of One, came all our good.

May the good God pardon all good 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."

But love me for love's sake, that evermore Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.

Most illogical Irrational nature of our womanhood, That blushes one way, feels another way, And prays, perhaps another!

Every age, Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned By those who have not lived past it.

Books are men of higher stature.

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.

But so fair, She takes the breath of men away Who gaze upon her unaware.

It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think - and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.

And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

I, who had had my heart full for hours, took advantage of an early moment of solitude, to cry in it very bitterly. Suddenly a little hairy head thrust itself from behind my pillow into my face, rubbing its ears and nose against me in a responsive agitation, and drying the tears as they came.