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 every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a 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.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

我如何愛你？讓我給你細數：

我愛你至深、至寬、至廣

我以我靈魂所能達至的極限愛你，

這極限非感覺可表述

只能憑上帝的恩賜直至生命的盡頭。

我愛你，如同對日光和燭光之渴求，

我倾盡所有的愛你，就像人們為自身權利而奮戰。

我對你的愛無比純潔，非為尋求別人的稱讚。

我愛你，我的深情蓋過往日的悲傷，

我愛你，憑我自童年堅持的信念，

我愛你，就像以曾失去了的愛

及像對逝去聖人的渴慕 ─ 那般深廣，

我愛你，以我生命中所有微笑、淚水背後的至情

如果上帝容讓，

我對你的愛將超越今生。

Among all women poets of the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During the years of her marriage to Robert Browning, her literary reputation far surpassed that of her poet-husband; when visitors came to their home in Florence, she was invariably the greater attraction. Both in England and in the United States she had a wide following among cultured readers.

An example of the reach of her fame may be seen in the influence she had upon the recluse poet who lived in the rural college town of Amherst, Massachusetts. A framed portrait of Mrs. Browning hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, whose life had been transfigured by the poetry of "that Foreign Lady." From the time when she had first become acquainted with Mrs. Browning's writings, Dickinson had ecstatically admired her as a poet and had virtually idolized her as a woman who had achieved such a rich fulfillment in her life.

When Samuel Bowles, a close friend of the Dickinson family and respected editor of the Springfield Republican, went to Europe for the first time, he took with him two books: the Bible and Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857). So highly regarded had she become by 1850, the year of Wordsworth's death, that she was prominently mentioned as a possible successor to the poet laureateship.

Her humane and liberal point of view manifests itself in her poems aimed at redressing many forms of social injustice, such as the slave trade in America, the labor of children in the mines and the mills of England, the oppression of the Italian people by the Austrians, and the restrictions forced upon women in nineteenth-century society.