Essays

								


Transcribed from the 1914 Burns & Oates edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

Essays by Alice Meynell

Contents:
WINDS AND WATERS
Ceres' Runaway
Wells
Rain
The Tow Path
The Tethered Constellations
Rushes and Reeds
IN A BOOK ROOM
A Northern Fancy
Pathos
Anima Pellegrina!
A Point of Biography
The Honours of Mortality
Composure
The Little Language
A Counterchange
Harlequin Mercutio
COMMENTARIES
Laughter
The Rhythm of Life
Domus Angusta
Innocence and Experience
The Hours of Sleep
Solitude
Decivilized
WAYFARING
The Spirit of Place
Popular Burlesque
Have Patience, Little Saint
At Monastery Gates
The Sea Wall
ARTS
Tithonus
Symmetry and Incident
The Plaid
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
Victorian Caricature
The Point of Honour
"THE CHEARFUL LADIE OF THE LIGHT"
The Colour of Life
The Horizon
In July
Cloud
Shadows
WOMEN AND BOOKS
The Seventeenth Century
Mrs. Dingley
Prue
Mrs. Johnson
Madame Roland
"THE DARLING YOUNG"
Fellow Travellers with a Bird
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult
The Unready
That Pretty Person
Under the Early Stars
The Illusion of Historic Time

CERES' RUNAWAY

One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of a
Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop--at least while the charming
quarry escapes, as it does in Rome.  The Municipality does not exist that
would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth of green in the high
places of the city.  It is true that there have been the famous
captures--those in the Colosseum, and in the Baths of Caracalla; moreover
a less conspicuous running to earth takes place on the Appian Way, in
some miles of the solitude of the Campagna, where men are employed in
weeding the roadside.  They slowly uproot the grass and lay it on the
ancient stones--rows of little corpses--for sweeping up, as at Upper
Tooting; one wonders why.  The governors of the city will not succeed in
making the Via Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a
thriving commerce.  Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and
shattered Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing of
buttercups.  "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,"
says Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid.  But a
couple of active scythes are kept at work there summer and spring--not
that the grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee-orchis, but
because flowers are not to laugh within reach of the civic vigilance.
Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these accessible
places, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing success and
victory.  It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits, lodges in the sun,
swings in the wind, takes wing to find the remotest ledges, and blooms
aloft.  It makes light of the sixteenth century, of the seventeenth, and
of the eighteenth.  As the historic ages grow cold it banters them alike.