Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barett Browning was born on this day in 1806. Her most famous poem: 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 the passion put to use In 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. A piece of trivia: Lord Leighton, one of my favorite painters, designed her tomb. It is made of Carrara marble and can be found in the "English Cemetery" in Florence Italy:

Free Literary Valentines

Keira Knightly and Matthew Macfadyen in Pride and Prejudice Does your special someone love to read? This gift will put a little spark into your relationship on Valentine's Day, and it'll only cost you a little time and some printer paper: customized classic literature. Find a piece of romantic literature that's in the public domain using Project Gutenberg. Let's use Pride and Prejudice as our example. Download the text to your computer and prepare it for eReading using these instructions. Now for the fun part: using the Find and Replace feature of your word processor, replace the names of the romantic leads with your name the name of your beloved. In Pride and Prejudice, for instance, I would replace the name Elizabeth with the name Brenda (my wife), and replace the name Darcy with my last name. Make sure you check for nicknames as well. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, for example, also goes by Lizzy, so you would want to replace that name as well. Picking a familiar book will help with this. Add page numbers, change fonts, do anything else you want to do to make it look fancy and/or romantic, then print it out. You can embellish it with pictures (clip-art or personal pictures from your digital collection), you can bind it in a decorative three-ring binder, or you can just staple the pages together and give it as-is. Here are some other books that you might consider: Emma by Jane Austen Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott Try it out!