a child who is the pilgrim, the spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome. . . . He is well used to words and voices that he does not understand, and this is a condition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loud in the night, they are to him as homely and as old as lullabies."
It is almost a pity, for letters, that so few poets have been mothers; it is the abiding pity of childhood that so few mothers have been poets! Mrs. Meynell has an entire volume dedicated to The Children, and sealed with that gracious understanding of child-life which nothing other than experience can quite authenticate. It is so easy to sentimentalise over children—easy, also, to regard them as necessary nuisances: but to bear with them consistently, in a spirit of love and of discovery, is a beautiful achievement. "Fellow travellers with a bird" (as Alice Meynell felicitously calls the protective adults) may learn strange and hidden things, an they have eyes to see or hearts to understand. Not so impatiently will they frown upon the strange excitement which sparkles from the child's eyes, as from the kitten's at dusk—inherited memories of the immemorial hunt, and of the "predatory dark" a thousand years ago. Not so surprising will seem the eternal conflict of bed-time, if they once realise the humorous and pretty fact that the little creature "is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught, surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to sleep than he takes a 'constitutional' with his hoop and hoopstick." In "The Child of Tumult" Mrs. Meynell has given a most tenderly subtle study; and here is her word upon the forgiveness of children:—
"It is assuredly in the absence of resentment that consists the virtue of childhood. What other
