Aurora Leigh Quotes

Earth's crammed with heaven... But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.

Witch, scholar, poet, dreamer, and the rest...

Books, books, books! I 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!

The world of books is still the world.

She lived, we'll say, A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, A quiet life, which was not life at all (But that she had not lived enough to know)

OF writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine,- Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend, Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is.

I take her as God made her, and as men Must fail to unmake her, for my honoured wife.

A cheerful genius suits the times, / And all true poets laugh unquenchably / Like Shakespeare and the gods.

O Life, How oft we throw it off and think, — 'Enough, Enough of life in so much! — here's a cause For rupture; — herein we must break with Life, Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged, Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!' — And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes And think all ended. — Then, Life calls to us In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice, Above us, or below us, or around . . Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's, Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed To own our compensations than our griefs: Still, Life's voice! — still, we make our peace with Life.

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, A quiet life, which was not life at all . . .

Did you think of that? Who burns his viol will not dance, I know. To cymbals, Romney.

Good aims not always make good books.

Did you ever read Aurora Leigh? – “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes.

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— ’Tis then we get the right good from a book.

The chances are that, being a woman, young, And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, You write as well...and ill...upon the whole, As other women. If as well, what then? If even a little better,..still, what then? We want the Best in art now, or no art." (L144-149)

I only thought Of lying quiet there where I was thrown Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her To prick me to a pattern with her pin, Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf, And dry out from my drowned anatomy The last sea-salt left in me.

Italy/Is one thing, England one.

And every common bush afire with God;  But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,  (Aurora Leigh, lines 61−3)

[O]ut of books / He taught me all the ignorance of men, / And how God laughs in heaven when any man / Says 'Here I'm learned; this, I understand; / In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.

We—all of us—want to feel special. We want to feel the glory that shines on us when we reach beyond our boundaries to grab at something greater, to live a heroic life, if only for a day or a week or a moment. This simple yearning is in us all, hardly recognizable, often only the merest hint that there is something more to us. This is why we seek out new places...we want to remember a somewhere that gave us the space to expand ourselves, to become a little more of who we truly are.

We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book And calculating profits - so much help By so much rending. 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 - 'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

The world of books is still the world, I write,
And both worlds have God’s providence, thank God,
To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,
Among the breakers, some hard swimming through
The deeps - I lost breath in my soul sometimes
And cried, ”God save me if there’s any God,”
But even so, God saved me; and, being dashed
From error on to error, every turn
Still brought me nearer to the central truth.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, paid in Aurora Leigh (1857) her well-known tribute to Keats in lines that are neither good as poetry nor accurate as fact, but in their chaotic way none the less passionately felt and haunting: — By Keats’ soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young, (the life of a long life Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn For ever;) by that strong accepted soul, I count it strange and hard to understand That nearly all young poets should write old.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,  And every common bush afire with God;  But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,  (Aurora Leigh, lines 61−3) Thomas

By slow degrees it broke on her slow sense… That she too in that Eden of delight Was out of place, and, like the silly kid, Still did most mischief where she meant most love. A thought enough to make a woman mad. Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh

We poets always have uneasy hearts, because our hearts, large rounded as the globe can turn but one side to the sun at once. We are used to dip our artist-hands in gall and potash, trying potentialities of alternated colours, till at last we get confused and wonder for our skin, how nature tinged it first.