I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death.

These are the last three lines of the sonnet that begins “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Barrett Browning wrote the sequence during her courtship with Robert Browning and gave the book a misleading title, “from the Portuguese”, as if it were a translation.