Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61,) née Barrett, was an English poet. Wife of the English poet Robert Browning, she was regarded as the pre-eminent English woman poet of her age and is remembered for her enduring love poems.
Born in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, Browning spent her childhood at Hope End, Herefordshire. At 10, she read Homer in the original. She wrote The Battle of Marathon (1820) and An Essay on Mind (1826) during her teens and had them printed privately at her father’s expense. She injured her spine and was an invalid for a long time.
Browning’s The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838) and Poems (1844) established her popularity. Poems contained ‘The Cry of the Children,’ a tirade against the employment of children in factories.
In January 1845, Browning received from the poet Robert Browning a letter stated, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett … I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.” They met that summer and married the following year. Robert and Elizabeth settled in Pisa 1846 and then Florence 1847, where they became the center of a literary circle.
Browning’s other works include Casa Guidi Windows (1851,) Aurora Leigh (1856; considered an early feminist text,) Poems before Congress (1860,) her best-known work Sonnets from the Portuguese (published in the Poems of 1850,) and the posthumous Last Poems (1851.)
In later years, Browning’ supported the Italian struggle for unity and independence.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A good neighbor sometimes cuts your morning up to mince-meat of the very smallest talk, then helps to sugar her bohea at night with your reputation.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Neighbors
The devil’s most devilish when respectable.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Evil
Since when was genius found respectable?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Genius
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!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Goodness
And each man stands with his face in the light of his own drawn sword. Ready to do what a hero can.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Time Management, Value of Time
The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, “Let no one be called happy till his death”; to which I would add, “Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Happiness
The place is all awave with trees,
Limes, myrtles, purple-beaded,
Acacias having drunk the lees
Of the night-dew, fain headed,
And wan, grey olive-woods, which seem
The fittest foliage for a dream.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
An ignorance of means may minister
To greatness, but an ignorance of aims
Make it impossible to be great at all.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Ignorance, Goals
Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed. But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the rest!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Named softly as the household name of one whom God had taken.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Names
Light tomorrow with today.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Future, The Present, Tomorrow
What monster have we here? A great Deed at this hour of day? A great just deed—and not for pay? Absurd—or insincere?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Good Deeds, Goodness, Deeds
I think it frets the saints in heaven to see
How many desolate creatures on the earth
Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship
And social comfort, in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
He, in his developed manhood, stood, a little sunburn by the glare of life.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: World
Every wish is like a prayer—with God.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Wishes, One liners
If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love’s
sake only. Do not say, I love her for her smile … her look … her way
Of speaking gently … for a trick of thought That falls in well with
mine, and, certes, brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day-
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may be changed, or change
for thee- and love so wrought, May be unwrought so.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Romance
What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
Let no one till his death
Be called unhappy. Measure not the work
Until the day’s out and the labor done:
Then bring your gauges.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Perseverance, Unhappiness, Endurance, Work, Resolve, Sadness
A woman’s always younger than a man of equal years.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Aging, Age
For ‘Tis not in mere death that men die most.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Dying, Death
God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Dreams, Gift, God
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.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Family, Mothers
O rose, who dares to name thee?
No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet,
But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubblewheat,—
Kept seven years in a drawer, thy titles shame thee.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Remembrance
The works of women are symbolical. We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, to put on when you’re weary—or a stool. To stumble over and vex you… “curse that stool!” Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean and sleep, and dream of something we are not, but would be for your sake. Alas, alas! This hurts most, this… that, after all, we are paid the worth of our work, perhaps.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Housework, Women
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.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Gratitude
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need; by sun and candle-light.
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,—I love thee with the breath.
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Love
We overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination… down our earth to rake … .
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Exaggeration
What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Genius
A great man leaves clean work behind him, and requires no sweeper up of the chips.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Greatness
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Words
Books, books, books 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!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Books, Reading
If you desire faith, then you have faith enough.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Faith, Desire
Books succeed, and lives fail.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Books, Reading
He lives most life whoever breathes most air.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Two human loves make one divine.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Marriage
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair, half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air beat upward to god’s throne in loud access of shrieking and reproach
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Grief, Grieving
Eternity stands always fronting God; a stern colossal image, with blind eyes, and grand dim lips, that murmur evermore, “God—God—God!”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Eternity
The man, most man,
Works best for men, and, if most men indeed,
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul:
While, obviously, this stringent soul itself
Obeys our old rules of development;
The Spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Men
Who so loves believes the impossible.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Love
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!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Women
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Christina Rossetti English Poet
Anne Bradstreet American Poet
Letitia Elizabeth Landon English Poet, Novelist
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu English Aristocrat, Poet
Frances Ridley Havergal English Anglican Poet
John Dryden English Poet
Christopher Marlowe English Playwright
Robert Browning English Poet
Algernon Charles Swinburne English Poet
Coventry Patmore English Poet