Alice Meynell Quotes (13 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Alice Meynell: 13 quotes0 likes

Famous Alice Meynell Quotes

“I came from nothing; but from where
Come these undying thoughts I bear?”

Opening lines of Song of Derivations" https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-song-of-derivations/"A. In Poems (London: John Lane, 1896) this poem is titled "The Modern Poet: A Song of Derivations". In later editions of Poems, it is titled "A Poet's Fancies VIII: A Song of Derivations".

“Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion.”

Alice Meynell

"Introductory Note" to The Poetry of Pathos & Delight: From the Works of Coventry Patmore; Passages Selected by Alice Meynell (London: William Heinemann, 1906), p. xi.

“She walks—the lady of my delight—
A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;
She keeps them from the steep”

Alice Meynell

Opening stanza of "The Shepherdess" https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-shepherdess/ in Later Poems (London: John Lane, 1902).

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

Alice Meynell

"The Colour of Life" in The Colour of Life and Other Essays on Things Seen and Heard (London: John Lane, 1896), p. 4.

“The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of "Peter Pan" to declare their faith in fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable "pretending" story ever written about a child.)No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they "pretend." That is their own word.[…] "Let's pretend," not "Let's believe."”

Alice Meynell

Their mother does not put "Let's pretend" into the child's mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception.</p>
"V. Fairies", pp. 32–33
Childhood (1913)

“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.”

Alice Meynell

"Eyes", pp. 98–99
The Colour of Life and Other Essays (1896)