ALICE MEYNELL

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.

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

A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back - it is already so far.

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.

The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.

The true color of life is the color of the body, the color of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest color of the unpublished blood.

The sense of humor has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, when Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.

Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.

Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

Childhood is but change made gay and visible.

She walks--the lady of my delight-- A sheperdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; She guards them from the steep. She feeds them on the fragrant height, And folds them in for sleep.

Now, in our opinion no author should be blamed for obscurity, nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry.

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.

I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman.

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.

The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man. And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains.

Spring and autumn are inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a cloud.

My day-mind can endure / Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. / But O, afraid, unsure, / My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.

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.

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.

recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.

The traveling heart went free / With endless streams; that strife was stopped; / And down a thousand vales I dropped, / I flowed to Italy.

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.