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Library / Literature & Fiction

Essays

by Alice Meynell

Pages
about 231
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
4.2 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 2.4 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

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

Ceres' Runaway Wells Rain The Tow Path The Tethered Constellations Rushes and Reeds

A Northern Fancy Pathos Anima Pellegrina! A Point of Biography The Honours of Mortality Composure The Little Language A Counterchange Harlequin Mercutio

Laughter The Rhythm of Life Domus Angusta Innocence and Experience The Hours of Sleep Solitude Decivilized

The Spirit of Place Popular Burlesque Have Patience, Little Saint At Monastery Gates The Sea Wall

Tithonus Symmetry and Incident The Plaid The Flower Unstable Equilibrium Victorian Caricature The Point of Honour

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

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.

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