Alice Meynell

“ For if ever Nature showed us a poet in whom our phrases, and the judgements they record, should be denied, defeated, and confused, Swinburne is he. We predicate of a poet a great sincerity, a great imagination, a great passion, a great intellect; these are the master qualities, and yet we are compelled to see here—if we would not wilfully be blind or blindfold—a poet, yes, a true poet, with a perfervid fancy rather than an imagination, a poet with puny passions, a poet with no more than the momentary and impulsive sincerity of an infirm soul, a poet with small intellect—and thrice a poet. ”

“ In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly as to get a continuous Sunday impression—the day and the people flowing, unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through ‘town,’ through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing. ”

“ A horizon dark with storm is another thing. The weather darkens the line and defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly dims it, or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky. The stormy horizon will take wing, and the sunny. Go high enough, and you can raise the light from beyond the shower, and the shadow from behind the ray. Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer of the eyes.
Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of some compassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their sea. ”

“ Returning childless, but, O Father, a child.
She therefore turned unto the Eastern hills,
Thrilled with a west wind sowing stars. She saw
Her lonely upward way climb to the verge
And ending of the day-time; and she knew
The downward way in presence of the night.
She heard the fitful sheep-bells in the glen
Move like a child's thoughts. There she felt the earth
Lonely in space. And all things suddenly
Shook with her tears. She went with shadowless feet,
Moving along the shadow of the world,
Faring alone to home and a long life,
Setting her twilight face to meet the stars. ”

“ Harvests apart, Spring, not Autumn, should make a childhood of memories for the future. In later Autumn, life is speeding away, ebbing, taking flight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed, retreating into the dark. The daily progress of things in Spring is for children, who look close. They know the way of moss and the roots of ivy, they breathe the breath of earth immediately, direct. They have a sense of place, of persons, and of the past that may be remembered but cannot be recaptured. Adult accustomed eyes cannot see what a child’s eye sees of the personality of a person ”

“ The cloud veils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry ray, suddenly bright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for a background. Or when anger had but threatened, the cloud reveals him, gentle beyond hope. It makes peace, constantly, just before sunset.
It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their colours. There is a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazard sky. ”

“ Waving of hands; dreams, when the day forgets;
⁠A care half lost in cares;
The saddest of my verses; dim regrets;
⁠Thy name among my prayers.
I would the day might come, so waited for,
⁠So patiently besought,
When I, returning, should fill up once more
⁠Thy desolated thought;
And fill thy loneliness that lies apart
⁠In still, persistent pain.
Shall I content thee, O thou broken heart,
⁠As the tide comes again,
And brims the little sea-shore lakes, and sets
⁠Seaweeds afloat, and fills
The silent pools, rivers and rivulets
⁠Among the inland hills? ”

“ When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair “with fingers cool as aspen leaves,” he knew the coolest thing in the world. It is a coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on both sides—the greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has no glows, no gold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he can shine between. Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind. You may have the sky sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all the woods are close. ”

“ But how is the grass itself London grass? Not only in its acre of intense green, but in the space of a square foot that might, one would think, be anywhere, it is London grass. The leaves, the blades, are London growth. You cannot evade the spirit of place by shutting out the sky, the railings, the people, or the gravel. Even if you go close and make acquaintance, as a child does, with the roots, you are aware that it is not the grass of England that you have there, but the grass of London. ”

“ Though thou art ever fair and kind,
The forests ever green,
Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind
Than calm in waters seen!
ODE TO HEAVEN Chorus of Spirits
FIRST SPIRIT Palace roof of cloudless nights!
Paradise of golden lights!
Deep, immeasurable, vast,
Which art now and which wert then
Of the present and the past,
Of the eternal where and when,
Presence-chamber, temple, home,
Ever canopying dome
Of acts and ages yet to come!
Glorious shapes have life in thee,
Earth, and all earth’s company;
Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses ”

“ In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too much. That is, he should not alter so greatly the character of night as to lose the solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude. The hours of sleep are too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; and Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when the larks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and sing daybreak songs when the London gas is lighted. Nature is easily deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to the hour. ”

“ With a smile do I complain in the safety of the pain,
Knowing that my feet can never quit their solitudes again;
But regret may turn with longing to that one hour's choice you had,
⁠For the silence is so sad.
I rebel not, child gone by, but obey you wonderingly,
For you knew not, young rash speaker, all you spoke, and now will I,
With the life, and all the loneliness revealed that you thought fit,
⁠Sing the Amen, knowing it. ”

“ It is for an epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear and cloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the round world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are unmeasured—you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the star itself is immeasurable.
But in the sky of “sunny Alps” of clouds the sight goes farther, with conscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. Man would not have known distance veritably without the clouds. ”

“ The thought of thee—and in the blue Heaven’s height,
And in the sweetest passage of a song.
Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng
This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden yet bright;
But it must never, never come in sight;
I must stop short of thee the whole day long.
But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away,—
With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart. ”

“ Somewhere, past the suburbs, the London spring had its frontier, and, this past, the sun and the sap dawned and rose with sudden authority, and spring was real.
Knowing how intimate is the sense of smell, one might think that the absence of the scent of the earth might account for all the deep difference of London. But it is not so; for you know the real spring by mere sight. Still, the lack of that fragrance is much. The earth is home, and the scent of it is the scent of infancy and home. Childhood knows it better than does the ploughman following the new furrow. ”

“ To dress a room once for all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of the days.
Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows which is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you see little except an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow—be the day bright enough—compose the very air through which you see the light. The trees show you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon the shining sky with little shadows that look translucent. The liveliness of every shadow is that some light is reflected into it ”