Alice Meynell

“ The colour of the electric lights has a strange effect in giving a complementary tint to the air in the early evening.—Essay on London.
O, Heavenly colour! London town
Has blurred it from her skies;
And hooded in an earthly brown,
Unheaven’d the city lies.
No longer standard-like this hue
Above the broad road flies;
Nor does the narrow street the blue
Wear, slender pennon-wise.
p. 27But when the gold and silver lamps
Colour the London dew,
And, misted by the winter damps,
The shops shine bright anew—
Blue comes to earth, it walks the street,
It dyes the wide air through ”

“ Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;
She guards them from the steep.
She feeds them on the fragrant height,
And folds them in for sleep. ”

“ And fold, and fall?
p. 20PARENTAGE
“When Augustus Cæsar legislated against the unmarried citizens of Rome, he declared them to be, in some sort, slayers of the people.”
Ah no, not these!
These, who were childless, are not they who gave
So many dead unto the journeying wave,
The helpless nurslings of the cradling seas;
Not they who doomed by infallible decrees
Unnumbered man to the innumerable grave.
p. 21But those who slay
Are fathers. Theirs are armies. Death is theirs,
The death of innocences and despairs ”