At Night
Reading edition
(To W. M.)
Home, home from the horizon far and clear,
Hither the soft wings sweep;
Flocks of the memories of the day draw near
The dovecote doors of sleep.
O, which are they that come through sweetest light
Of all these homing birds?
Which with the straightest and the swiftest flight?
Your words to me, your words!
POEMS BY ALICE MEYNELL
Complete Edition, with Portrait by J. S. Sargent. 6s.
In its class, I know of no nobler or more beautiful sonnet than “Renouncement”; and I have so considered it ever since the day I first heard it, when Rossetti (who knew it by heart), repeating it to me, added that it was one of the three finest sonnets ever written by women.—William Sharp.
The last verse of that perfectly heavenly “Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age,” the whole of “San Lorenzo’s Mother,” and the end of the sonnet “To a Daisy” are the finest things I have yet seen or felt in modern verse.—John Ruskin.
It is poetry, the spiritual voice of which will become audible when the “high noises” of to-day have followed the feet that made them.—Francis Thompson.
With an exquisite singleness of genius she stands apart, and escapes the categories. The more you live with these pages, the more will you be persuaded that they contain in unusual proportion the stuff of immortality.—J. L. Garvin.
She was the saint of our poetry. She etherealized love and spiritualized passion and humanized theology.—James Douglas.
It is the peculiar characteristic of Mrs. Meynell’s poetry that it is itself creative. Her feelings spring from her mind, her thoughts from her heart. There is room in them for a wit that is the weapon of the rarest tenderness.—The Times.
ESSAYS BY ALICE MEYNELL
With a Frontispiece in Photogravure. Price 7s. 6d.
Mrs. Meynell’s papers are little sermons, ideal sermons. Let no one uninstructed by them take fright at the title, they are not preachments. They leave a sense of stilled singing in the mind they fill. The writing is limpid in its depths.—George Meredith.
She was among the six or seven best women writers in the records of English literature, and the only one of them to achieve greatness as an essayist.—J. C. Squire.
She never wrote a line or even a word without putting brains into it; or, in the most exact sense, meaning what she said. I will venture the prophecy that her fullest fame is yet to come. The whole modern world must immeasurably enlarge itself before it comes near the measure of her mind.—G. K. Chesterton.
Prose such as is not written by any other essayist of our time.—The Daily News.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.