Was never cheapened by the way;
Thy single sorrow crowns thee lord
Of an unpurchasable word.
Oh strong! Oh pure!
As Yea makes happier loves secure,
I vow thee this
Unique rejection of a kiss!
······
More than one meditation of this final volume suggest the influence of that immemorial (and in these latter days too little known) treasure-house of poetry and vision, the Roman Breviary. But always the distinction and the originality of Alice Meynell's thought, the peculiar personality of her vision, have about them a very sacredness. Not lightly comes the illumination of the singular soul: that particular judgment so transcendently more appalling than the final and general judgment! She has not feared to travel up the mountain side alone—to look down, with eyes that have known both tears and the drying of tears, upon the ways of human life.
In the matter of artistry and poetic technique, Mrs. Meynell's work is like fine gold smithery; classic gold smithery, exquisite and austere. "I could wish abstention to exist, and even to he evident in my words," she has somewhere written; but the words are scrupulously chosen. Her mastery over slight forms—the quatrain, the couplet—is quite as consummate and almost as felicitous as Father Tabb's. And through this ethereal poetry shine lines of the highest and most serious power.
They who doomed by infallible decrees
Unnumbered man to the innumerable grave,
falls upon the ear with Miltonic grandeur. And
