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
Experience, like a pale musician, holds a dulcimer of patience in his hand.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Experience
For ‘Tis not in mere death that men die most.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Death, Dying
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
Eve is a twofold mystery.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Women
Who so loves believes the impossible.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Love
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
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
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
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
The devil’s most devilish when respectable.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Evil
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Beauty
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
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
Light tomorrow with today.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: The Present, Tomorrow, Future
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
Topics: Prayer
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
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: Mothers, Family
Hurt a fly! He would not for the world: he’s pitiful to flies even. “Sing,” says he, “and tease me still, if that’s your way, poor insect.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A woman’s always younger than a man of equal years.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Age, Aging
Every wish is like a prayer—with God.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: One liners
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
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
He, in his developed manhood, stood, a little sunburn by the glare of life.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: World
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
Two human loves make one divine.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Marriage
Since when was genius found respectable?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Genius
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Opinion
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
If you desire faith, then you have faith enough.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Faith, Desire
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
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.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Photography
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