The world was first aware of Alice Meynell (or as she then was, Alice Thompson) as a poet when the little initial volume, Preludes, blossomed into life like a March violet—early enough, one can never forget, to win Ruskin's enthusiastic praise. Three of its selections ("San Lorenzo's Mother," together with the closing lines of the "Daisy" sonnet and that unforgettable "Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age") he forthright declared "the finest things I have yet seen, or felt, in modern verse." That was a personal estimate, to be sure, since Tennyson, Browning, Patmore, and Swinburne were all in the act of writing memorable things; but what a thunderously significant tribute to lay at the feet of a young girl just lifting up her voice in song! Abyssus abyssum invocat.
More than a quarter of a century has passed, and in the actual matter of poetry, Mrs. Meynell has published but two additional volumes, the Poems of 1893 (an augmented reprint of the original booklet) and the slight but weighty Later Poems of 1901; these, with fugitive strains of rare beauty in some favoured review, make up the sum. The voice in its moment was ex cathedra; having spoken, she may hold her peace.
She has elected all along to speak in a deliberately vestal and cloistral poetry. Remote as the mountain snows, yet near as the wind upon our face, is her song. It is seldom sensuous, the very imagery being evoked, in the main, from the
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