“Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff;
Life and these lips have long been separated:
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”

“Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.”

“Death in the wood,—
In the death-pale lips apart;
Death in a whiteness that curdled the blood,
Now black to the very heart:
The wonder by her was formed
Who stands supreme in power;
To show that life by the spirit comes
She gave us a soulless flower!”

“Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands,
Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands,
Silent above the flowers, her children lost,
Slain by the arrows of the early Frost.”

“Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“I sought not in her visage, for the tinge of the morning, and the lustre of heaven. These had vanished with life; but I hoped for liberty to print a last kiss upon her lips. This was denied me; for such had been the merciless blow that destroyed her, that not a lineament remained!”

“She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.”

“This sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults.”

“There was a basket at her feet. She reached into it and lifted out the head of a young woman, a marquise. She wore Bourbon white to her death, but wears the tricolor now - white cheeks, blue lips, red dripping from her neck. Long live the revolution.”

“Once, long ago in her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love.
Sunshine on ice.
She warms his frost. He cools her fever.”