Love Letters of Great Men

Amazing book..it sort of makes my heart ache. this makes me believe that love only existed a couple hundred years ago. where, oh where is my mozart?

Dear little wife; I have a number of requests to make. I beg you
1. Not to be melancholy
2. To take care of your health and beware of the spring breezes
3. Not to go out walking alone- and preferably not to go out walking at all
4. feel absolutely assured of my love. up to the present i have not written a single letter to you without placing your dear portrait before me.
5. I beg in your conduct not only to be careful of your honour and mine, but also to consider appearances. Do not be angry with me for asking this. You ought to love me even more for thus valuing our honor.

I am delighted that you have a good appetite- but whoever gorges a lot, must aslo shit a lot - no, walk a lot, I mean. But I should not like you to take long walks without me. i entreat you to follow my advice exactly, for it comes from my heart. Adieu - my love- my only one. Do catch them in the air - those 2999 1/2 little kisses from me which are flying about, waiting for someone to snap them up. Listen, i want to whisper something in your ear - and you in mine- and now we open and close our mouths- again- again and again- at last we say: 'It is all about Plumpi - Strumpi-' Well, you can think what you like- that is just why it's so convenient. Adieu. A thousand tender kisses.
Ever yours,
Mozart
-W.A. Mozart to his wife Constanze, 1789

Even in bed my ideas yearn towards you, my Immortal Beloved, here and there joyfully, then again sadly, awaiting from Fate, whether it will listen to us. I can only live, either altogether with you or not at all. Yes, I have determined to wander about for so long far away, until I can fly into your arms and call myself quite at home with you, can send my soul enveloped by yours into the realm of spirits – yes, I regret, it must be.
What longing in tears for you- You- my Life - my All- farewell. Oh, go on loving me- never doubt that faithfullest heart.
Of your beloved,
L
Ever thine.
Ever mine.
Ever ours.
Ludwig Van Beethoven to his 'Immortal Beloved'


"I have not spent a day without loving you; I have not spent a night without embracing you; I have not so much as drunk one cup of tea without cursing the pride and ambition which force me to remain apart from the moving spirit of my life. In the midst of my duties, whether I am at the head of my army or inspecting the camps, my beloved Josephine stands alone in my heart, occupies my mind, fills my thoughts. If I am moving away from you with the speed of the Rhône torrent, it is only that I may see you again more quickly. If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days the arrival of my sweet love."
-Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine de Beauharnais, 1796


"I cannot live without you, and not only you but chaste you, virtuous you. The sun rises and sets, the day passes, and you follow the bent of your inclination to a certain extent, you have no conception of the quantity of miserable feeling that passes through me in a day.
Yours forever - J. Keats
-John Keats to Fanny Brawne,1819

"In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most in yours – amor mio – is comprised my existence here and hereafter. I feel I exist here; and I feel I shall exist hereafter, to what purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of age, and two out of a convent, I wish you had stayed there, with all my heart, or at least, that I had never met you in your married state. But all this is too late, I love you, and you love me – at least you say so, and act, as if you did so, which last is a great consolation at all events.
But I more than love you and cannot cease to love you. Think of me sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us, but they never will, unless you wish it."
Lord Byron to the Countess Guiccioli, 1819


"Could I not become to you what you were to me, then my suffering would have distressed you, and I would have destroyed the most beautiful harmony of our friendship through my confession. I would have also lost that, what I had, your true and sisterly friendship. And yet again there come moments, when my hope arose afresh, wherein the happiness, which we could give each other, seemed to me exalted above every, every consideration, when I considered it even as noble to sacrifice everything else to it. You could be happy without me – but not become unhappy through me. This I felt alive in me – and thereupon I built my hopes.
You could give yourself to another, but none could love you more purely or more completely than I did. To none could your happiness be holier, as it was to me, and always will be. My whole existence, everything that lives within me, everything, my most precious, I devote to you, and if I try to ennoble myself, that is done, in order to become ever worthier of you, to make you ever happier. Nobility of souls is a beautiful and indestructible bond of friendship and of love. Our friendship and love become indestructible and eternal like the feelings upon which we establish them."
-Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller to Charlotte von Lengefeld, 1789

"My heart and I surrender themselves into your hands, and we supplicate to be commended to your good graces, and that by absence your affections may not be diminished to us, for that would be to augment our pain, which would be a great pity, since absence gives enough, and more than I ever thought could be felt."
Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, 1533