Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Eaton & Mains, 1907 - Biography & Autobiography - 232 pages
 

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Page 165 - Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints.
Page 132 - Women know The way to rear up children (to be just), They know a simple, merry, tender knack Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, And stringing pretty words that make no sense, And kissing full sense into empty words, Which things are corals to cut life upon, Although such trifles...
Page 120 - WHAT are we set on earth for ? Say, to toil; Nor seek to leave thy tending of the vines For all the heat o' the day, till it declines, And death's mild curfew shall from work assoil. God did anoint thee with his odorous oil, To wrestle, not to reign; and he assigns All thy tears over, like pure crystallines, For younger fellow-workers of the soil To wear for amulets. So others shall Take patience, labor, to their heart and hand, From thy hand and thy heart and thy brave cheer, And God's grace fructify...
Page 138 - we are weary, And we cannot run or leap; If we cared for any meadows, it were merely To drop down in them and sleep.
Page 159 - You never can be satisfied with praise Which men give women when they judge a book Not as mere work but as mere woman's work, Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn. " Oh, excellent ! What grace, what facile turns, what fluent sweeps, What delicate discernment . . almost thought ! The book does honour to the sex, we hold. Among our female authors we make room For this fair writer, and congratulate The country that produces in these times Such women, competent to . . spell.
Page 168 - And view the ground's most gentle dimplement, (As if God's finger touched but did not press In making England) such an up and down Of verdure, — nothing too much up or down, A ripple of land ; such little hills, the sky Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb...
Page 125 - To move a body, — it takes a high-souled man, ' To move the masses . . even to a cleaner stye : ' It takes the ideal, to blow an inch inside ' The dust of the actual : and your Fouriers failed, ' Because not poets enough to understand ' That life develops from within.
Page 206 - I write so Of the only truth-tellers now left to God, The only speakers of essential truth, Opposed to relative, comparative, And temporal truths...
Page 178 - A CURSE FOR A NATION. PROLOGUE. I HEARD an angel speak last night, And he said, ' Write ! Write a Nation's curse for me, And send it over the Western Sea.
Page 178 - I fall, I swoon ! I look at the sky ; The clouds are breaking on my brain . I am floated along, as if I should die Of liberty's exquisite pain.

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