Alice Meynell

"It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature."

"[R]ight language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do."

"[N]o mirror keeps its glances."

"Thou art like silence unperplexed,  A secret and a mystery Between one footfall and the next."

"O Spring, I know thee! Seek for sweet surprise  In the young childrens eyes. But I have learnt the years, and know the yet  Leaf-folded violet."

"Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide, Like all created things, secrets from me, And stand a barrier to eternity."

"Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, Floats in the midst, a little cloud at tether."

"Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the colour of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste."

"My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,  Into thy garden; thine be happy hours Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,  From root to crowning petal thine alone."

"The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man.And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains."

"The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly not that which is rather forest or field than garden, the landscape garden of false taste; nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed and weeded parterre with an unstarred lawn; but rather the garden long ago strictly planned, rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and delicate, but later set free, given over to time and the sun; not a wilderness, but having an enclosed wilderness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence and excess."

"We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies."