Page:A father of women, and other poems, Meynell, 1917.djvu/36

A FATHER OF WOMEN AND OTHER POEMS their father. The spiritual bond between father and daughter could not be more exquisitely touched. But the larger background of her thought presently emerges. This father of women left no son. And now, when the world is crippled of its sons, its women are called to remember that they are "daughters of men," to rise to the need and fill the empty place.—Manchester Guardian.

She writes on the Shakspere Tercentenaries. So did ten thousand other poets. They boxed the compass of the obvious as to the manner born—which indeed most of them were. Only two writers, Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mrs. Meynell, broke silence because they had something to say. And Mrs. Meynell's reflections on the fact that she had lived through the Tercentenaries of Shakspere's birth and death, and might, with such length of days, have seen him in his cradle and closed the earth on him, the image of that magnificence and fullness thus enclosed as it were within her own comparative waste (as she sees it) are very characteristic of her inability to write like a hack. She has a poem on the Early Dead in Battle. Her mind travels its own road, and she discovers to us, surprisingly but convincingly, that he who dies in early manhood has actually the longest part of life behind him, and that time is never so long and joy never so deep as in childhood, and that, as we grow old, the later years seem more fleeting and less full. A thinker so conscientious is never in danger of polishing nothings. All her work is of one piece; and, at its finest, it is of its kind perfect.— in Land and Water.

BURNS & OATES, 28 Orchard Street, London, W.