Alice Meynell

This moment's Tiber with his shining eyes Never saw Rome before.

Round the blue sea I love the best The argent foam played, slender, fleet; I saw—past Wordsworth and the rest— Her natural, Greek, and silver feet.

My day-mind can endure Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. But O, afraid, unsure, My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.

Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these—except the dog when he bays the moon—look skyward not at all.

I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because the world has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear "musical," that it has not …

[E]xaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand—the worst manner of violence.

Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.

What else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere?

It may well be doubted whether children are generally credulous.[…] For children do not believe in fairies a jot. I have just asked my youngest daughter whether she believed in them, and she said "Of course not—only I liked the stories." …

It is for fear of the grown-up, or at least out of respect towards them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. "Who is to care if they do not? Who is to be …

But in the eternities, Doubtless we shall compare together, hear A million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

With this ambiguous earth His dealings have been told us. These abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

Thou inmost, ultimate Council of judgment, palace of decrees Where the high senses hold their spiritual state, Sued by earth's embassies, And sign, approve, accept, conceive, create.

The travelling heart went free With endless streams; that strife was stopped; And down a thousand vales I dropped, I flowed to Italy.

[A]n English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has not too much, but too little, art.

It is not extravagance, it is not excitement, it is not excess, or dizziness, or delirium, that chastises habitual pleasure in art, but only dullness.[…] One of the Latin races, having the dullness and keeping wit enough to name it, has …

Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos.

Flocks of the memories of the day draw near The dovecote doors of sleep.

From the shaken tower A flock of bells take flight And go with the hour.

She walks—the lady of my delight— A shepherdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; She guards them from the steep; She feeds them on the fragrant height, And folds them in for sleep.

Surely there is but one assumption […] wherewith nearly all thinkers […] have done their work—that is, the confession of the moral law: that there is a good, and that pure cruelty, mere hatred, and ingratitude, for example, are contrary …

[I]t is doubtful whether we may name any weak thing as typically spiritual.

[T]here is nothing so exacting, so difficult, so various, as the consistency of a complete theory, nothing so overwhelming to a slothful student.

London visibly works at nothing but transformation.