107
" Everybody praises me, and I look in the looking-glass with a better conscience. Also, it is an improving improvement, and will be, until, you know, the last hem of the garment of summer is lost sight of, and then — and then — I must either follow to another climate, or be ill again — that I know, and am prepared for. It is but dreary work, this undoing of my Penelope web in the winter, after the doing of it through the summer, and the more progress one makes in one’s web, the more dreary the prospect of the undoing of all these fine silken stitches. But we shall see.... "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
110
" The Christian religion is true or it is not, and if it is true it offers the highest and purest objects of contemplation. And the poetical faculty, which expresses the highest moods of the mind, passes naturally to the highest objects. Who can separate these things? Did Dante? Did Tasso? Did Petrarch? Did Calderon? Did Chaucer? Did the poets of our best British days? Did any one of these shrink from speaking out Divine names when the occasion came? Chaucer, with all his jubilee of spirit and resounding laughter, had the name of Jesus Christ and God as frequently to familiarity on his lips as a child has its father’s name. You say ‘our religion is not vital — not week-day — enough.’ Forgive me, but that is a confession of a wrong, not an argument. And if a poet be a poet, it is his business to work for the elevation and purification of the public mind, rather than for his own popularity! while if he be not a poet, no sacrifice of self-respect will make amends for a defective faculty, nor ought to make amends. "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
112
" At last we see your advertisement. Viva ‘Agnes Tremorne’! We find it in ‘Orley Farm.’ How admirably this last opens! We are both delighted with it. What a pity it is that so powerful and idiomatic a writer should be so incorrect grammatically and scholastically speaking! Robert insists on my putting down such phrases as these: ‘The Cleeve was distant from Orley two miles, though it could not be driven under five.’ ‘One rises up the hill.’ ‘As good as him.’ ‘Possessing more acquirements than he would have learned at Harrow.’ Learning acquirements! Yes, they are faults, and should be put away by a first-rate writer like Anthony Trollope. It’s always worth while to be correct. But do understand through the pedantry of these remarks that we are full of admiration for the book. The movement is so excellent and straightforward — walking like a man, and ‘rising up-hill,’ and not going round and round, as Thackeray has taken to do lately. He’s clever always, but he goes round and round till I’m dizzy, for one, and don’t know where I am. I think somebody has tied him up to a post, leaving a tether. "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
117
" At Genoa the weather was so exquisite, so absolutely June weather, that at the end of a week’s lying on the sofa, I had rallied again quite, only poor darling Robert was horribly vexed and out of spirits all that time, as was natural. I feel myself, every now and then (and did then), like a weight round his neck, poor darling, though he does not account it so, for his part. Well, but it passed, and we were able to walk about beautiful Genoa the last two days, and visit "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
118
" Tell me, have you read Mr. Dickens’s ‘America;’ and what is your thought of it like? If I were an American, it would make me rabid, and certain of the free citizens are furious, I understand, while others ‘speak peace and ensue it,’ admire as much of the book as deserves any sort of admiration, and attribute the blameable parts to the prejudices of the party with whom the writer ‘fell in,’ and not to a want of honesty or brotherhood in his own intentions. I admire Mr. Dickens as an imaginative writer, and I love the Americans — I cannot possibly admire or love this book. Does Mr. Martin? Do you? "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning