People don’t write love letters like they used to

Alas! One lamentable thing in modern life is that people don’t write love letters like they used to. Gone are the days of passionate and elegant love letters written in fancy and artistic handwriting decorated with great many flourishes – delicious epistles that were often diffused with the intoxicating mist of fragrant flowers and sealed with a burning kiss.

There was a time when the art of writing beautifully necessitated the use of poetic and passionate words, the finest paper, the most expressive quill or stylus, the most flamboyant calligraphy, the tenderest of scents, the most dignified seal impressed upon the brightest red wax, and most of all, the deepest yearnings of a soul longing to be expressed.

During this age, time is a rare commodity and technology has taken control of our lives. In our daily rush, we have succumbed to fast food, instant coffee, quickie this and quickie that. We have lost most of the magical skills that make life divinely beautiful including the fine art of writing well-composed and fabulously crafted letters penned by heart, mind, soul and hand. These days we have become content with the convenient coldness of the e-mail and the abbreviated impersonality of text messages. Now, how romantic is that?

Words of the heart must be expressed beautifully and sent in the most exquisite manner possible. You must take time and make time for writing your innermost love thoughts and feelings. There is nothing like the appeal and seduction of a gloriously written love note. For once in your life, partake of the awesome experience of sending and receiving a heart melting love letter. Besides, one day your little lyrical masterpiece might turn out to be a classic!

Fabulous Love Letters

Here’s a sumptuous sampling of letters written in the splendid, heart-stopping, uplifting, handwritten, old-fashioned way:

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December 30, 1915

Off you go again alone and it’s with a very heavy heart I part from you. No more kisses and tender caresses for ever so long – I want to bury myself in you, hold you tight in my arms, make you feel the intense love of mine.

You are my very life Sweetheart, and every separation gives such endless heartache... Goodbye my Angel, Husband of my heart. I envy my flowers that will accompany you. I press you tightly to my breast, kiss every sweet place with tender love...

God bless and protect you, guard you from all harm, guide you safely and firmly into the new year. May it bring glory and sure peace, and the reward for all this war has cost you.

I gently press my lips to yours and try to forget everything, gazing into your lovely eyes – I lay on your precious breast, rested my tired head upon it still. This morning I tried to gain calm and strength for the separation. Goodbye wee one, Lovebird, Sunshine, Huzy mine, Own! —Tsarina Alexandra to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia

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November 2, 1856

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. — Count Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer, to his fiancee Valeria Arsenev

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February 27, 1913.

I want my rapscallionly fellow vagabond. I want my dark lady. I want my angel – I want my tempter. I want my Freia with her apples. I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour, laughter, music, love, life and immortality ... I want my inspiration, my folly, my happiness, my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my final sanity and sanctification, my transfiguration, my purification, my light across the sea, my palm across the desert, my garden of lovely flowers, my million nameless joys, my day’s wage, my night’s dream, my darling and my star... —George Bernard Shaw to Stella‚ Beatrice Campbell

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Friday 8 p.m.

I love you, I love you, my Victor; I can not reiterate it too often; I can never express it as much as I feel it. I recognise you in all the beauty that surrounds me in form, in colour, in perfume, in harmonious sound: all of these mean you to me.

You are superior to all. I see and admire –- you are all! You are not only the solar spectrum with the seven luminous colours, but the sun himself, that illumines, warms, and revivifies! This is what you are, and I am the lowly woman that adores you. –Juliette Drouet, French actress, to Victor Hugo, French writer, sometime in 1835. Drouet wrote passionate love letters to Hugo for over 50 years.

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March 4, 1983

Dear First Lady,

I know tradition has it that on this morning I place cards – Happy Anniversary cards – on your breakfast tray. But things are somewhat mixed up. I substituted a gift and delivered it a few weeks ago.

Still this is the day, the day that marks 31 years of such happiness as comes to few men. I told you once that it was like an adolescent’s dream of what marriage should be like. That hasn’t changed.

You know I love the ranch but these last two days made it plain I only love it when you are there. Come to think of it that’s true of every place and every time. When you aren’t there I’m no place, just lost in time and space.

I more than love you, I’m not whole without you. You are life itself to me. When you are gone I’m waiting for you to return so I can start living again.

Happy Anniversary and thank you for 31 wonderful years.

I love you.

Your Grateful Husband

–US President Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan, aboard Air Force One

* * * How Do Your Letters Compare?

Aaaah! Don’t the above letters just make your heart swoon? Have you ever sent or received one that comes close to any of them? May these expressions of the heart inspire you to write love poems and letters that bare your deepest feelings in the most sensitive and magnificent way. Realize that it is never to late to start. Love and life are what you take time to make.

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