Meteyard's twenty-five illustrations to Longfellow's Golden Legend, published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1910, were his most ambitious venture in the field of book illustration, although he undertook one other book single-handed - May Byron, A Day with John Milton, 1913, and collaborated with his fellow Birmingham artists on two joint projects in the 1890s - A Book of Pictured Carols (1893) and The Quest (1894-6). Unlike most of these artists, he was not particularly concerned to make his illustrations an integral part of the overall design of the book, treating those for the Golden Legend as highly finished watercolours which, when reproduced in colour, remain essentially independent of the text.

A number of the Longfellow illustrations survive. Four were included in the Masterly Art exhibition held at Birmingham in 1986-7 (no catalogue), and two in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican in 1989 (nos. 87-8, one repr. in cat.). The design of the Annunciation which forms the frontispiece is in a private collection in America; see 19th Century English Art from the Collection of Harold and Nicolette Wernick, exh. Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Mass., 1988, cat. no. 29