Life & Wisdom Quote by Alice Meynell

Meynell’s line is a gentle rebuke to the modern superstition that happiness can be engineered by stacking the right experiences. She doesn’t deny that events matter; she demotes them. The real engine is interior weather: “tides of the mind” suggests something rhythmic, bodily, and only partly governable, not a switch you flip with better plans or brighter company. The phrasing quietly refuses the moralism that often clings to cheerfulness. If moods move like tides, then sorrow isn’t always a failure of character, and joy isn’t always a reward for good behavior.

As a poet writing in the late Victorian and early modern period, Meynell is also pushing back against a culture of composure. Victorian etiquette prized self-command, but her metaphor admits the mind’s recurrent swells and undertows. The subtext is both consoling and unsettling: consoling because it frees you from blaming the world (or yourself) for every dip; unsettling because it implies you can’t purchase happiness by rearranging external conditions alone. “Depends upon” is the key concession. Dependence is vulnerability. Happiness is less a trophy than a condition of attention, interpretation, and temperament.

There’s a proto-psychological clarity here that anticipates modern talk therapy without sounding clinical. Meynell offers a compact ethic: treat your mind like a landscape with seasons, not a machine with inputs. Events happen; the deeper story is the mind that receives them.