Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/121

 Alice MeynelPs Essays and Poems Uniform Edition. Mr. GEORGE MEREDITH, in an Article on "Mrs. MeyneWs Essays," in The National Review for August, Mrs. Meynell's papers are little sermons, ideal sermons let no one uninstructed by them take fright at the title, they are not preachments; they are of the sermon's right length, about as long as the pas- sage of a Cathedral chant in the ear, and, keeping throughout to the plain step of daily speech, they leave a sense of stilled singing in the mind they fill. The writing is limpid in its depths. She must be a diligent reader of the Saintly Lives. Her manner presents to me the image of one accustomed to walk in holy places and keep the eye of a fresh mind on our tangled world, happier in observing than in speaking. And I can fancy Matthew Arnold light- ing on such Essays as I have named, saying with refreshment, "She can write! " It does not seem to me too bold to imagine Carlyle listening, without the weariful gesture, to his wife's reading of the same, hearing them to the end, and giving his com- ment, "That woman thinks." . . . To the metrical themes attempted by her she brings emotion, sin- cerity, together with an exquisite play upon our finer chords quite her own, not to be heard from another. Some of her lines have the living tremour in them. JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON AND NEW YORK