“I believe the fault comes from a too-sweet sense of the freedom of being true with you, telling you all, hiding nothing.”

Connecting intimacy with the freedom to speak without concealment · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 15 June 1846

• Communication
• Freedom
• Truth

“Come what will my life has borne flower and fruit—it is a glorious, successful, felicitous life, I thank God and you.”

Looking upon his life as fulfilled after his marriage to Elizabeth · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 14 September 1846

• Gratitude
• Life
• Love

“All you gain by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and have done rightly in trusting to your innate ideas—or not rightly in distrusting them, as the case may be.”

Suggesting that travel tests and clarifies what the imagination already possesses · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 16 April 1845

• Discovery
• Imagination
• Travel