Page:Poems, Meynell, 1921.djvu/151

 Seven Shillings and Sixpence

N its class, I know of no nobler or more beautiful sonnet than "Renouncement"; and I have so considered 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.—.

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.—.

The footfalls of her muse waken not sounds, but silences. We lift a feather from the marsh and say: "This way went a heron," ... 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.—.

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.—.

What makes these poems singular amid all the poems of to-day is the fact that mind and spirit, intellect and imagination, mortal and immortal, have equal parts in them.—New Statesman.

It is the peculiar characteristic of Mrs. Meynell's poetry that it is itself creative. Its grace and beauty are the flower, not only of her life, but of her contemplation of life. Her very daydreams are lit with the light of day. 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. Mrs. Meynell's books have taken their chosen, quiet, unfaltering way—too lofty a way for ease or weariness or absent-mindedness to follow. She is sure.—Times.

Mrs. Meynell found herself long ago, and was found by all English-speaking lovers of poetry.—Manchester Guardian.

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