One poem in the book is, perhaps, most remarkable for the light it throws upon the sense in which the term poetic truth may be used, and as showing the difference between the poetic, the realizable, and, therefore, the true side of a religion--the side Matthew Arnold was so anxious to keep--and the mere theological framework, always smelling of unreality and always in need of renovation. The poem may stand as a warning against confusing real poetry--in whose truth we need not be afraid to trust because its author does not inhabit our own thought world--with versified theology. If all of Mrs. Meynell's work were like her _Messina, 1908_, then the critic and reader who now mistakenly shun her would be right. And the poem is a curious commentary upon Mr. Eastman's insistence that poetry is realization. For in her other poems the author has presented those aspects of her religion which are verifiable in experience. Perhaps the quotations given above bear out that point. But one aspect of religious thought has now been pretty generally abandoned, not because it has ever been proven false, but because we have never succeeded in realizing it for ourselves. The God of orthodox church theodicy never did "make good"; Christ, the Saints, and even the very material form of the cross itself had to mediate between man and the divine. And it is precisely in the one case in this book where Mrs. Meynell tries to present the governing rather than the immanent God to us that she fails--as, if poetry be realization, we should expect her to fail. The first stanza of the poem addressed to the Deity describes in a few bold strokes the wreck of Messina, and ends with the lines: Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own Immediate unintelligible hand. The second stanza describes the missions of mercy to the stricken city, and ends: ... our shattered fingers feel Thy mediate and intelligible hand. The essential weakness of this dependence for poetic effect upon the two adjectives and their negatives is no less obvious than the weakness of the poet's attribution of such apparently impulsive and then retractatory conduct to a God whose ways must either be explicable in terms of a human sense of order or not made the subject of human discourse at all.