Hi,
You will need extra elements to do it as you can’t style a first-word in css (although you can style first-letter and first-line).
This works for two lines of text and will work with any text but won’t wrap nicely to three lines.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<style type="text/css">
h1 {
margin:0 0 20px;
background: #1e5799; /* Old browsers */
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #1e5799 0%, #207cca 26%, #2989d8 50%, #2989d8 74%, #7db9e8 100%); /* FF3.6+ */
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%, #1e5799), color-stop(26%, #207cca), color-stop(50%, #2989d8), color-stop(74%, #2989d8), color-stop(100%, #7db9e8)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #1e5799 0%, #207cca 26%, #2989d8 50%, #2989d8 74%, #7db9e8 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #1e5799 0%, #207cca 26%, #2989d8 50%, #2989d8 74%, #7db9e8 100%); /* Opera11.10+ */
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #1e5799 0%, #207cca 26%, #2989d8 50%, #2989d8 74%, #7db9e8 100%); /* IE10+ */
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#1e5799', endColorstr='#7db9e8', GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */
background: linear-gradient(top, #1e5799 0%, #207cca 26%, #2989d8 50%, #2989d8 74%, #7db9e8 100%); /* W3C */
overflow:hidden;
width:100%;
position:relative;
min-width:626px;
}
h1 span {
float:left;
padding:0 10px 105px;
background:brown;
margin:0 5px -100px 0;
position:relative;
}
b {
position:relative;
z-index:2;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><span>First</span> <b>word is styled differently from the rest of the text and can wrap to two lines</b></h1>
<h1><span>First-word-styling</span> <b> - The first word is styled differently</b></h1>
</body>
</html>