love

My bed is so empty that i keep on waking up; As the cold increases, the night-wind begins to blow.......It rustles the curtains, making a noise like the sea..
...Oh that those were waves which could carry me back to you........

Chien Wen-ti


If all those glittering monarchs that command the servile quarters of this earthly ball........should tender in exchange their shares of land, i would not change my fortunes for them all.....Their wealth is but a counter to my coin....The world's but theirs; but my beloved's mine....

Francis Quarles

Love is a short word, but it contains all: it means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel it as we feel the warmth of the blood, we breath it as we breathe the air, we carry it in ourselves as we carry our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. It is not a word; it is an inexpressible state indicated by four letter.........

Guy de Maupassant


love to faults is always blind...always is to joy inclined....lawless, winged and unconfined...and breaks all chains from every mind.....

William Blake



Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilment; each of it’s joys ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the first sentimant of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attritributes, establishes marriage and gives premanence to human society. For it is a fire that kindling it’s first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all mature with its generous flames.

Ralph Waldo Emerson


Love is the most intensive desire of the soul to enjoy beauty, and, where it is reciprocal, is the most entire and exact union of hearts. Love gives courage to the most fearful; sharpens the wit of the most simple; gives fidelity to the most depraved minds, constancy to the most unsettled; and, of itself alone, hath power to draw those hearts which have received it to acts of goodness, honesty, virtue, and gallentry, with more efficiency than all the most exact examples of history and philosophy. The desire of a lover is to be loved, and tht perfect union of hearts is the perfection of lovers’ happiness, as love is the cause of the greatest ills that men suffer, it is the cause also of the most perfect pleasures, consisting only in extremes; and as many as are made miserable by love, none are made happy without love.

Algernon Sidney


A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of it’s unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand, only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back - it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together and being invisibly nourished by it.
The joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or the joy of participation, it is also the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes. Perfect poise on the beat is what gives good dancing its sense of ease, of timelessness, of the eternal. It is what Blake was speaking of when he wrote:

He who bends to himself a joy
Doth the winged likfe destry;
But he who kisses the hoy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

The dancers who are perfectly in time never destroy "the winged life" in each other or in themselves...When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation. And it is this lack of fear that makes for the dance. When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music - then, and then only, are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh


Love is my life, life is my love,
Love is my whole felicity,
Love is my sweet, sweet is my love,
I am in love, and love in me.

Michael Drayton


Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day,
with night we banish sorrow;
Sweet air blow soft, mount lark’s aloft
To give my Love good-morrow!
Wings from the wind to please her mind
Notes from the lark I’ll borrow;
Bird, prune thy wing, nightingale sing,
To give my Love good-morrow
To give my Love good-morrow
Notes from them both I’ll borrow.

Wake from the nest, Robin-red-breast,
Sing bids in every furrow;
And from each hill, let music shrill
Give my fair Love good-morrow!
Blackbirds and thrush in every bush
Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow!
You pretty elves, amongst yourselves
Sing my fair Love good-morrow;
To give my Love good-morrow;
Sing, birds, in every furrow.

Thomas Heywood



My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickest fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder that all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves, and pomegranates,
and peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves, and silver fleur-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life is come,
My love is come to me.

Christina Rossetti


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 grief, 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 Browning


http://www.lavendermist.com/journey/lovenotes/