any poet might rejoice in the fancy which perceives day's memories flocking home at dusk to the "dove-cote doors of sleep," or cries out so subtly in the colourless February dawning:
A poet's face asleep is this grey morn!
Mrs. Meynell's poetry, like a certain school of modern music, suggests and betrays rather than expresses emotion. It is definite but intangible. It creates an atmosphere of angelically clear thought, of rare delicacies of feeling, and speaks with a perfect reticence. Mistakenly, perhaps, the hasty might dub it a poetry of promise: on the contrary, it is a poetry of uncommonly fine achievement. But it does not achieve the expected thing. We are conscious of a light, a flash, a voice, a perfume—the soul of the Muse has passed by. And we were looking for the body, flower-crowned!
When all is said, it is in her prose that Mrs. Meynell has attained the most compelling and indubitable distinction. In much critical work and some biography, and in a series of essays covering subjects all the way from "impressionist" art to the ways of childhood—or from "Pocket Vocabularies" to the "Hours of Sleep"—her pen has prevailed with a masterful delicacy. These brief pages are seldom distinctly literary in theme, yet they have made literature. Scarcely ever are they professedly religious, yet the whole science of the saints rests by implication within their pages. Alice Meynell is the true contemplative of letters. For contemplation, which in the spiritual world has been described as a looking at and listening to God, is in the world of art a looking at and listening to life. It is an exceedingly quiet and sensitive attention to all that others see but transiently, superficially, in the
