First time he kissed me, he but only kissed / The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
The sonnet remembers a first kiss on the hand, and how the fingers have stayed “more clean and white” ever since. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning married in secret in 1846, and the sonnets were first printed in her Poems of 1850.
Earth’s crammed with heaven, / And every common bush afire with God;
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, / Awake for ever in a sweet unrest.