treasured above all cheaper gifts in the more mature pages. Much has been said about that unique and heart-shaking " Letter from a Girl to her Own Old Age." But there is a less known apostrophe, "The Poet to his Childhood," about which something remains to be spoken. It probes to the heart of the sacrificial vocation—whether poetic or sacerdotal matters little:
If it prove a life of pain, greater have I judged the gain,
With a singing soul for music's sake I climb and meet the rain,
And I choose, whilst I am calm, my thought and labouring to be
Unconsoled by sympathy.
Mrs. Meynell has loved the Lady Poverty as truly as ever the Assisian did: but hers is a Lady whose realm is over letters as well as life. She dwells in the twilight and the dawn; her cool, quiet fingers are pressed upon the temples of love; in "slender landscape and austere," in nature marvellously but not rapturously understood, she is found. And close beside her treads another Lady, "our sister, the Death of the Body"—Death the Revealer, making clear at last the mysteries of weary Life. This is distinctly the motive, very personal and very perfect, not merely of the much-praised sonnet "To a Daisy," but of Mrs. Meynell's Nature poetry as a whole.
Through "The Neophyte" and "San Lorenzo Giustiniani's Mother" the selfsame cry is variously but unmistakably heard. It stings the soul in that late and mystical lyric:
Why wilt thou chide,
Who hast attained to be denied?
Oh learn, above
All price is my refusal, Love.
My sacred Nay
