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Happy Valentines Day!!!!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning How Do I Love Thee

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to useIn my old griefs,
and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!
--- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. In 1809, her father Edward, having made most of his considerable fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations which he inherited, bought "Hope End", a 500-acre (2.0 km2) estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire, England. Elizabeth was the eldest of Edward and his wife Mary Graham-Clarke, who had 12 children.
Elizabeth was educated at home, attending lessons with her brother's tutor and was consequently well educated for a girl of that time.
Her first poem on record is from the age of six or eight. The manuscript is currently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, but the exact date is doubtful because the "2" in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out. A long Homeric poem titled The Battle of Marathon was published when she was fourteen, her father paying for its publication. Barrett later referred to her first literary attempt as, "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone."
During her teen years, she read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante's Inferno in their original languages. Her appetite for knowledge led her to learn Hebrew and read the Old Testament from beginning to end. By the age of twelve, she had written an "epic" poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets.

I chose Elizabeth Barrett Browning this Valentines Day to showcase one of the all time best love poems ever written.

Have a wonderful day spent with someone you love. If not together than through thought.

Love,

Danna