“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not…”

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyesI all alone beweep my outcast state,And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,And look upon myself, and curse my fate,Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,With what I most enjoy contented least;Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,Haply I think on thee, and then my state,Like to the lark at break of day arisingFrom sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth bringsThat then I scorn to change my state with kings.

My bride,My wife, my life. O we will walk this world,Yoked in all exercise of noble end,And so through those dark gates across the wildThat no man knows. Indeed I love thee: come,Yield thyself up: my hopes and thine are one:Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself;Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.