Alice Meynell

The roads […] fly from the city of confusion.[…] No other road looks so resolute in flight as the rail.

The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily continuable.

Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.

Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act.

Childhood is but change made gay and visible.

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence.

I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong, I shun the thought that lurks in all delight— The thought of thee—and in the blind Heaven's height, And in the sweetest passage of a song.

I am dark but fair, Black but fair.

I came from nothing; but from where Come these undying thoughts I bear?

I make the whole world answer to my art.

A poet of one mood in all my lays, Ranging all life to sing my only love, Like a west wind across the world I move, Sweeping my harp of floods mine own wild way.

But, visiting Sea, your love doth press And reach in further than you know, And fills all these, and when you go, There's loneliness in loneliness.

O daisy mine, what will it be to look From God's side even of such a simple thing?

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.

For you knew not it was I, And I knew not it was you. We have learnt, as days went by. But a flower struck root and grew Underground, and no one knew.

Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers, And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers; A poet's face asleep in this grey morn. Now in the midst of the old world forlorn A mystic child is set …

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.

[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 children's eyes. But I have learnt the years, and know the yet Leaf-folded violet.

Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion.

There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon.