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Eminescu 1850 - 1889 (39)

While love, of any kind, lightens and sweetens life, hate darkens it, fills it with bitterness and make it nasty.


QUOTES

What is love

What is love? A lifetime spent
Of days that pain does fill,
That thousand tears can't content,
But asks for tears still.

With but a little glance coquet
Your soul it knows to tie,
That of its spell you can't forget
Until the day you die.

Upon your threshold does it stand,
In every nook conspire,
That you may whisper hand in hand
Your tale of heart's aspire.

Mihai Eminescu was a Romanian poet and writer, considered to be the national poet of Romania. He was born on 15 January 1850 in Botosani to a wealthy rural family. At 16 he sent lyrics to a magazine and was published. He started his studies in Chernivtsi and later moved to Vienna and Berlin. He learned fluent German and studied various subjects, such as philosophy and law, but without getting a degree. He returned to Romania and worked as a librarian, school inspector and journalist, in a very troubled time for his country, which was recently liberated from the Ottoman Empire and was seeking its national identity. Eminescu, with his literary talent and education, contributed to the development of modern Romanian language and literature.

In 1876 he felt in love with a married poet; he devoted to her passionate and desperate poems. In 1883 he lost his job in the newspaper due to political confrontations and was forced to move to Bucharest. In the same year he suffered from a mental illness that physicians would call today manic-depressive. He was treated in Austria and returned to Romania but in 1889 his illness worsened and he was forced to enter a hospital in Bucharest for hospitalization. There, another patient, on June 15, 1889, broke his head with a stone. There was a suspicion that it could have been a murder, as he was fierce in his writing against the Romanian king who wanted to close an agreement with the Austro-Hungarians at that time.