Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Aurora Leigh (1856)

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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.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Yet how proud we are,
In daring to look down upon ourselves!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
That headlong ivy! not a leaf will grow But thinking of a wreath,... I like such ivy; bold to leap a height 'Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on graves As twist about a thyrsus; pretty too (And that's not ill) when twisted round a comb.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Those tall flowering-reeds which stand In Arno, like a sheaf of scepters left But some remote dynasty of dead gods To suck the stream for ages and get green.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
With what cracked pitchers go we to deep wells In this world!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Let us be content in work
To do the thing we can, and not presume
To fret because it's little.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Men do not think
Of sons and daughters, when they fall in love.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
It made him easier to be pitiful,
And sighing was his gift.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
That he, in his developed manhood, stood
A little sunburnt by the glare of life;
While I.. it seemed no sun had shone on me.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,
By reiteration chiefly.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Whoso loves
Believes the impossible.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Nay, if there's room for poets in the world
A little overgrown, (I think there is)
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne's, — this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Whoever lives true life will love true love.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
We have hearts within,
Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
For say a foolish thing but oft enough…
…the same thing
Shall pass at last for absolutely wise,
And not with fools exclusively.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Man, the two-fold creature, apprehends
The two-fold manner, in and outwardly,
And nothing in the world comes single to him.
A mere itself, — cup, column, or candlestick,
All patterns of what shall be in the Mount;
The whole temporal show related royally,
And build up to eterne significance
Through the open arms of God.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The growing drama has outgrown such toys
Of simulated stature, face, and speech:
It also peradventure may outgrow
The simulation of the painted scene,
Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume,
And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,
With all its grand orchestral silences
To keep the pauses of its rhythmic sounds.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits, — so much help
By so much reading. 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 —
'T is then we get the right good from a book.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What is art,
But life upon the larger scale, the higher.

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

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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
What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit...
Keep up the fire,
And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat
As Fleet Street to our poets.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
He wrapt his little daughter in his large
Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning