large. We can scarcely believe many minds capable of the exquisitely subtle and sustained attention, the delicate weighing, the differentiation, and withal the liberal sympathy, which have been the very keynote of her criticism. Take, as an instance, this pregnant passage upon the return and periodicity of our mental processes:
"Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless the 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. Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods toward death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards recovery. . . Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain—it returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. . . . Love itself has tidal times—lapses and ebbs which are due to the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved."
Coventry Patmore (who in his turn has been the subject of Mrs. Meynell's illuminative criticism) declared fully one half of the volume just quoted, The Rhythm of Life, to be "classical work, embodying as it does new thought in perfect language, and bearing in every sentence the hallmark of genius." Only the poets, perhaps, have shared with the saints this singular contemplative attention to things great and small. And in the Nature painting which colours Mrs. Meynell's pages the same quality is conspicuous. Neither the lyre nor the brush seems strange to the hand which has so sketched for us the majesty
