Her married life matured her vigilance as a mistress of prose. In W. E. Henley of The Scots Observer and The National Ob server, she encountered an editor who heartened her by his boisterous welcomes : "That woman's taking her place at the steering wheel" was one of his recorded acclaims. Later, in The Pall Mall Gazette of Harry Cust's editorship, she was ac corded a weekly column which left her a large range in the choice of subjects. George Meredith, reading here her "princely jour nalism," sought with her an acquaintance that soon became a "dearest friendship." In a magazine—those were still the days of the magazines—he spoke of her words as having the "living tremor in them," just as he had before said that Carinthia's had the "throb beneath them." Of her essays, he wrote : "The sur prise coming on us from their combined grace of manner and sanity of thought is like one's dream of what the recognition of a new truth would be. They leave a sense of stilled singing on the mind they fill. The writing is limpid in its depths." Coventry Patmore, too, her yet warmer admirer, published, when Tennyson died, his unavailing plea for her succession to the laureateship. Her close friendship for such seniors coincided with that for her contemporaries, and for her juniors, chief among whom was Francis Thompson, who addressed to her his exquisite sequence of poems Love in Dian's Lap, of which, Patmore said, Beatrice or Laura might have been proud. Of the homage paid to her, another chosen friend, J. L. Garvin, has well said: "Alice Meynell was in herself a person of her age, sure, as I think, of perpetual remembrance, even if half a dozen of her shining con temporaries had not competed in vain to spoil her with praise.
It was what no one could do: recognition only made her humble." And these contemporary praises notwithstanding, G. K. Chester ton predicts: "She was deservedly famous; but I will venture to prophesy that her fullest fame is yet to come. The whole modern world must immeasurably enlarge itself before it comes near the measure of her mind." She died in London on Nov. 27, 1922.
Alice Meynell's Preludes (1875), long out of print, re-appeared in a volume of Poems (1893) including new ones; and these, to gether with yet later verses separately issued as A Father of Women (1917) and Last Poems (1923), are all assembled in the complete volume of Poems (1923) now in circulation. Of her prose, several small volumes of essays in the '9os—Tile Rhythm of Life (1893), The Colour of Life (1896) and The Spirit of Place (1899)—were followed by Ceres' Runaway (1909), by Hearts of Controversy (1917), by The Second Person Singular (1921) and finally by the standard volume of selected Essays (1914)—the selection being her own. Other books were John Ruskin (1900), The Children of the Old Masters (1903), Mary, the Mother of Jesus (1912) and London Impressions (1898). Two anthologies give her choice among poems—The Flower of the Mind (1897) and The School of Poetry (1923), the first in cluding Notes and the second Commentaries. She prefaced edi tions of The Sonnets from the Portuguese and Christina Rossetti's Poems (I 91 0), as well as a decade of volumes "The Red Letter Library"; she introduced in 1903 a volume of reproductions of Sargent's Portraits; and she made for English readers a Selection from the Poems of J. B. Tabb (1906). (W. ME.) See Viola Meynell, Alice Meynell (1929).