- Napoleon Bonaparte To Josephine
I wake filled with thoughts of you.
Your portrait and the intoxicating evening which
we spent yesterday have left my senses in turmoil.
Sweet, incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have on my heart! Are you angry?
Do I see you looking sad? Are you worried?...
My soul aches with sorrow, and there can be no rest
for you lover; but is there still more in store for me when, yielding to the profound feelings which overwhelm me,
I draw from your lips, from your heart a love which consumes me with fire?
Ah!it was last night that I fully realized how false an image of you your portrait gives!
You are leaving at noon; I shall see you in three hours. Until then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses; but give me none in return,
for they set my blood on fire.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) To Robert Browning:
And now listen to me in turn. You have touched me more profoundly than
I thought even you could have touched me - my heart was full when you came here today.
Henceforward I am yours for everything....
- Leo Tolstoy, Russian to Valeria Arsenev:
I already love in you your beauty, but I am only beginning to
love in you that which is eternal and ever precious - your heart, your soul.
Beauty one could get to know and fall in love with in one hour and cease to
love it as speedily; but the soul one must learn to know. Believe me,
nothing on earth is given without labour, even love, the most beautiful
and natural of feelings.
- Alfred de Musset to Amantine Aurore Dudevant:
I have something stupid and ridiculous to tell you.
I am foolishly writing to you instead of having told you this,
I do not know why, when returning from that walk.
To-night I shall be annoyed at having done so.
You will laugh in my face, will take me for a maker of phrases in all my relations
with you hitherto.
You will show me the door and you will think I am lying.
I am in love with you. I have been thus since the first day I called on you.
- Honore de Balzac to Madame Evelina Hansk:
Our love will bloom always fairer, fresher, more gracious,
because it is a true love, and because genuine love is ever increasing.
It is a beautiful plant growing from year to year in the heart, ever extending
its palms and branches, doubling every season its glorious clusters and perfumes;
and, my dear life, tell me, repeat to me always, that nothing will bruise
its bark or its delicate leaves, that it will grow larger in both our hearts,
loved, free, watched over, like a life within our life...
- Gustave Flaubert, famous French writer, to his wife Louise Colet:
I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses,with ecstasy.
I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die.
I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports...
When you are old,I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.
- John Keats To Fanny Brawne:
Sweetest Fanny,
You fear, sometimes, I do not love you so much as you wish?
My dear Girl
I love you ever and ever and without reserve. The more I have known you
the more have I lov'd. In every way - even my jealousies have been
agonies of Love, in the hottest fit I ever had I would have died for you.
I have vex'd you too much. But for Love! Can I help it? You are always new.
The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest;
the last movement the gracefullest. When you pass'd my window home yesterday,
I was fill'd with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time.
You uttered a half complaint once that I only lov'd your Beauty. Have I nothing else
then to love in you but that? Do not I see a heart naturally furnish'd with
wings imprison itself with me? No ill prospect has been able to turn your thoughts
a moment from me. This perhaps should be as much a subject of sorrow as joy -
but I will not talk of that. Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire
devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing you love me.
My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into
a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete
and undistracted enjoyment - upon no person but you. When you are in the room
my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses.
The anxiety shown about our Love in your last note is an immense pleasure to me;
however you must not suffer such speculations to molest you any more:
not will I any more believe you can have the least pique against me. Brown is gone out
-- but here is Mrs Wylie -- when she is gone I shall be awake for you. --
Remembrances to your Mother.
Your affectionate, J. Keats
- Mark Twain, American writer, to Olivia Langdon, his future wife:
May 12, 1869
Out of the depths of my happy heart wells a great tide of love and prayer for
this priceless treasure that is confided to my life-long keeping.
You cannot see its intangible waves as they flow towards you, darling,
but in these lines you will hear, as it were, the distant beating of the surf.
So we know love is truly an eternal feeling with these romantic love letters.
Now write your own love letter and shower the spring of love on your sweetheart.
Read through these great love letter tips and express your innermost feelings to
your beloved this Valentine's Day.
- Gustave Flaubert, French writer to Louise Colet:
Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private,
personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of
my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the
beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me.
I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old
passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts
of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that
swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a storm cloud.
On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to
the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank.
- Lord Byron to Annabella Milbanke:
My Heart
We are thus far separated - but after all one mile is as bad as a thousand -
which is a great consolation to one who must travel six hundred before he meets
you again. If it will give you any satisfaction - I am as comfortless as a pilgrim
with peas in his shoes - and as cold as Charity - Chastity or any other Virtue.
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