Alice Meynell: 44 books

... THE theology of the older Church does not restrict the life and history and legend of Mary to the New Testament. It refers to the Prophets before, and to tradition after, her brief record in the Gospels. Chief of all prophecies is that of Isaiah : " Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you...

Most of these verses were written in the author’s early youth, and were published in a volume called ‘Preludes, ’ now out of print. Other poems, representing the same transitory and early thoughts, which appeared in that volume, are now omitted as cruder than the rest; and their place is taken by the few verses written in maturer years.

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the...

Fifty years after Tennyson’s birth he was saluted a great poet by that unanimous acclamation which includes mere clamour. Fifty further years, and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of change from the sorry custom...

     Where is her ladyhood?  Not here, Not among modern kinds of men; But in the stony fields, where clear Through the thin trees the skies appear; In delicate spare soil and fen, And slender landscape and austere.