Alice Meynell

“ Single and spiritual notes of light.
What call they at my window-bars?
The South, the past, the day to be,
An ancient infelicity.
Darkling, deliberate, what sings
This wonderful one, alone, at peace?
What wilder things than song, what things
Sweeter than youth, clearer than Greece,
Dearer than Italy, untold
Delight, and freshness centuries old? ”

“ Fear leap in a babe's face, and take his breath,
⁠Fear, like the fear of eld
That knows the price of life, the name of death.
⁠What is it justifies
This thing, this dread, this fright that has no tongue,
⁠The terror in those eyes
When only eyes can speak—they are so young? ”

“ How far apart the summers were of yore,
⁠How far apart the snows.
⁠Therefore be satisfied;
Long life is in your treasury ere you fall;
Yes, and first love, like Dante's. O a bride
⁠For ever mystical! ”

“ Thy dedicated date, O mortal, twice,
To what all-vain embrace shall be compared
My lean enclosure of thy paradise?
⁠To ignorant arms that fold
A poet to a foolish breast? The Line,
That is not, with the world within its hold? ”

“ THE LORD'S PRAYER
"Audemus dicere 'Pater Noster.'"—CANON OF THE MASS.
THERE is a bolder way,
There is a wilder enterprise than this
All-human iteration day by day.
Courage, mankind! Restore Him what is His. ”

“ LORD, where are Thy prerogatives?
⁠Why, men have more than Thou hast kept;
The king rewards, remits, forgives,
⁠The poet to a throne has stept.
And Thou, despoiled, hast given away
⁠Worship to men, success to strife,
Thy glory to the heavenly day,
⁠And made Thy sun the lord of life. ”

“ DEAR are some hidden things
⁠My soul has sealed in silence; past delights,
Hope unconfessed; desires with hampered wings,
⁠Remembered in the nights.
But my best treasures are
⁠Ignoble, undelightful, abject, cold ”

“ Two o'clock, the morning of October 12th, 1915.
TO her accustomed eyes
The midnight-morning brought not such a dread
As thrills the chance-awakened head that lies
In trivial sleep on the habitual bed. ”

“ Her mind travels its own road, and she discovers to us, surprisingly but convincingly, that he who dies in early manhood has actually the longest part of life behind him, and that time is never so long and joy never so deep as in childhood, and that, as we grow old, the later years seem more fleeting and less full. ”

“ Dutiful, frequent, closed in all distress;
Not shedding of the unoffending blood;
⁠Not little joy grown less;
⁠"Not all-benign old age
With dotage mocked; not gallantry that faints
And still pursues ”

“ Meynell's papers are little sermons, ideal sermons. Let no one uninstructed take fright at the title, they are not preachments. They leave a sense of stilled singing in the mind they fill. The writing is limpid in its depths. ”

“ How keen his choice, how swift his feet!
⁠Narrow the way and hard to find!
This delicate stepper and discreet
⁠Walked not like any worldly wind.
Most like a man in man's own day,
⁠One of the few, a perfect one:
His open earth—the single way ”

“ TO O——, OF HER DARK EYES
ACROSS what calm of tropic seas,
⁠'Neath alien clusters of the nights,
Looked, in the past, such eyes as these?
⁠Long-quenched, relumed, ancestral lights!
The generations fostered them ”

“ IN SLEEP
I DREAMT (no "dream" awake—a dream indeed)
A wrathful man was talking in the park:
"Where are the Higher Powers, who know our need
⁠And leave us in the dark?
"There are no Higher Powers ”

“ A thinker so conscientious is never in danger of polishing nothings. All her work is of one piece; and, at its finest, it is of its kind perfect.—J. C. Squire in Land and Water.
BURNS & OATES, 28 Orchard Street, London, W.
THE POEMS OF ALICE MEYNELL
One Volume, finely printed, and bound in Buckram, with the Portrait by Sargent in photogravure. 6s. net. Postage 4d.
"With an exquisite singleness of genius she stands apart and escapes the categories. The more you live with these pages, the more will you be persuaded that they contain in unusual proportion the stuff of immortality. ”

“ Made thrive the serried flocks and herds.—
⁠Yonder are men shot through the eyes.
⁠Love, hide thy face
From man's unpardonable race. ·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠· Who said "No man hath greater love than this,
⁠To die to serve his friend"? ”