A thousand single central daisies they, A thousand of the one; For each, the entire monopoly of day; For each, the whole of the devoted sun. Even so typically modern a philosopher as Henri Bergson would find one of his leading and rather baffling ideas beautifully realized in one of Mrs. Meynell's sonnets. Matter, Bergson tells us, in all its manifestations is moulded by a spiritual push from behind it, so that the sensible world is not a mosaic of atoms obeying fixed laws but rather a cosmic compromise between matter and spirit, a _modus vivendi_ the operation of which would seem very different to us were our viewpoint that of pure spirit. Says Mrs. Meynell in _To a Daisy_: Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide Like all created things, secrets from me, And stand, a barrier to eternity. And I, how can I praise thee well and wide From where I dwell--upon the hither side? Thou little veil for so great mystery, When shall I penetrate all things and thee, And then look back? For this I must abide, Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled Literally between me and the world. Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring, And from a poet's side shall read his book. O daisy mine, what shall it be to look From God's side even of such a simple thing? The sense of what might, perhaps, be called restrained paradox in that sonnet, is frequently met with in Mrs. Meynell's writings, and it corresponds to aspects of reality which the old religious phraseology she has so freshly minted for us is alone fitted to convey. _The Young Neophyte_ is a beautiful sonnet enshrining the fatefulness of every human action, the gift of the full flower which is implicit in the gift of the smallest bud, the preparation we are constantly making for crises which are yet hidden in the future. _Thoughts in Separation_ also deals with the paradoxical overcoming of the handicaps of personal absence of our friends through community of thought and feeling. Not only are these paradoxes in human psychology delicately set forth by the poet, but those darker ones of human work and destiny are consolingly illuminated in such a poem as _Builders of Ruins_--which does not depend for its quality of consolation upon anything foreign to its poetic truth.