I imagine that there is hardly a living mortal, be he poet or acknowledged critic, who, called upon for an appreciation of Mrs. Meynell’s poetry, will not approach his task feeling as might a surveyor called in to take the measurements of the Holy of Holies. The everyday reviewer will have the shamefaced consciousness of hobnail boots added to that of the surveyor’s incongruous calling.

Mrs. Meynell was undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of an age of great poets. The greatest we may not call her, since some extra merit must be accorded to the difficult achievement of excellence sustained throughout bulky volumes; but making necessary allowance for differing tastes, perhaps it were not too much to call her the most perfect poet of the nineteenth century. What other has so matched the perfect word to the perfect thought? Where else than in the hundred or so brief poems she gave to the world, shall we seek vainly for a commonplace line or phrase, or a word put in merely to fill up the measure of rhyme or rhythm? Had she chosen to put her art before her life, her vocation as poet before her vocation as wife and mother, possibly the inimitable quality of her poetry might not have lost by quantity—wherein, however, such rare excellence as hers is hardly to be looked for, perhaps not even desired. We best appreciate the faultless specimen of some rare flower in its cloistral solitude of the hot-house.