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Alice Meynell
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“Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, / Unseen, this colorless sky of folded showers, / And folded winds ... ”
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“Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, / Floats in the mist, a little cloud at tether.”
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“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.”
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“O daisy mine, what will it be to look / From God's side even of such a simple thing?”
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“... no mirror keeps its glances ... ”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“I come from nothing; but from where / Come the undying thoughts I bear?”
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“... I am dark but fair, / Black but fair.”
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“Red has been praised for its nobility of the color of life. But the true color of life is not red. Red is the color of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the color of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the color of life violated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste.”
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“In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curious history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political death.”
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“ 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 ... ”
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“Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.”
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“Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act.”
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“Childhood is but change made gay and visible ... ”
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“With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.”
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“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.”
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“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. It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance.”
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“Solitude is separate experience. ”
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“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.”
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“My heart shall be thy garden.”
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“She walks — the lady of my delight — / A shepherdess of sheep. / Her flocks are thoughts.”
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“The traveling heart went free / With endless streams; that strife was stopped; / And down a thousand vales I dropped, / I flowed to Italy.”
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“Brief, on a flying night, / From the shaken tower / A flock of bells take flight, / And go with the hour.”
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“A wall is the safeguard of simplicity.”
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“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.”
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“... the feet should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else about us. ... It is only the entirely unshod that have lively feet.”
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“Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow.”
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“... for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing. ... nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.”
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“In childhood we all have ... a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings — a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.”
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“Spring and autumn are inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a cloud.”
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“The cloud controls the light ... It is the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground shine.”
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“We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic of all secondary lights.”
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“Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them; it goes its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no wearinesss, it knows no bonds.”
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“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 ... ”
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“ ... 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.”
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“If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.”
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“... the sense of humor has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.”
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“Assuredly it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.”
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“Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place ... ”
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“Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.”
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“All things tend to become specialized, except only words. Though in the house of life itself the organs, as life grows more perfect, begin to draw apart to their own separate functions; though the laborer, in the later association of mankind, finds his task by degrees to dwindle in range and to be enforced within closer and closer repetitions; and though only a small division of any of the sciences that have come towards adult and responsible age falls to the share of a single specialist, the word alone grows not expert and special, but general and inexpert. It is obliged to do more various things, and to do them with less directness ... ”
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“... if night comes without thee / She is more cruel than day.”
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“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.”
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“Dear laws, be wings to me! / The feather merely floats. O, be it heard / Through weight of life — the skylark's gravity — / That I am not a feather, but a bird.”
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“O travelers swift / From secrets to oblivion! Waters wild / That pass in act to bend a flower, or lift / The bright limbs of a child!”
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“Straitened and serious elder daughter of her time, she swept the house of literature ... Encumbered by this drift and refuse of English, Charlotte Brontë yet achieved the miracle of her vocabulary. It is less wonderful that she should have appeared out of such a parsonage than that she should have arisen out of such a language.”
Alice Meynell, English poet, essayist, critic
(1847 - 1922)
Full name:Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson Meynell