Catholic World (Volume 92) (Paperback)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1911. Excerpt: ... MRS. MEYNELL: AN APPRECIATION. BY KATHERINE BREGY. DHE world was first aware oi Alice Meynell (or, as she then was, Miss Alice Thompson) as a poet. It was back in 1875 that the little initial volume, Preludes, blossomed into life like a March violet-- early enough, one can never forget, to win Ruskin's enthusiastic praise. Three of its selections (" San Lorenzo's Mother," together with the closing lines of the "Daisy" sonnet, and of that unforgettable "Letter From a Girl to Her Own Old Age") he forthright declared "the finest things he had yet seen or felt in modern verse." That was a personal estimate, to be sure, since Tennyson, Browning, Fatmore, and Swinburne were all in the act of writing memorable things; but what a thunderously significant tribute to lay at the feet of a young girl just lifting up her voice in song Abyssus dbyssum invocat. More than quarter of a century has passed, and the Preludes have scarcely seen fulfillment; since in the actual matter of poetry Mrs. Meynell has published but two additional volumes, the Poems of 1893 (an augmented reprint of the original booklet) and the slight but weighty Later Poems of 1901; these, with fugitive strains of rare beauty in some favored review, make up the sum. Yet no authentic poet--nor any authentic critic--of to-day dare deny her fellowship in the hierarchy of song. The voice in its moment was ex cathedrd; having spoken, she may hold her peace. She has elected all along to speak in a deliberately vestal and cloistral poetry. Remote as the mountain snows, yet near as the wind upon our face, is her song. It is seldom sensuous, the very imagery being evoked, in the main, from the intellectual vision; and there are moments when "amorous Thought has sucked pale Fancy's breath" quite out of the stanzas. Yet these tremble wit...