The Project Gutenberg EBook of England of My Heart--Spring, by Edward Hutton

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Title: England of My Heart--Spring

Author: Edward Hutton

Release Date: November 18, 2003 [EBook #10120]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ENGLAND of my HEART

SPRING

BY

EDWARD HUTTON

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS BY
GORDON HOME

MCMXIV

TO MY FRIEND
O.K.

INTRODUCTION

England of my heart is a great country of hill and valley, moorland
and marsh, full of woodlands, meadows, and all manner of flowers, and
everywhere set with steadings and dear homesteads, old farms and old
churches of grey stone or flint, and peopled by the kindest and
quietest people in the world. To the south, the east, and the west it
lies in the arms of its own seas, and to the north it is held too by
water, the waters, fresh and clear, of the two rivers as famous as
lovely, Thames and Severn, of which poets are most wont to sing, as
Spenser when he invokes the first:

"Sweete Themmes runne softly till I end my song";

or Dryden when he tells us of the second:

"The goodly Severn bravely sings
The noblest of her British kings,
At Caesar's landing what we were,
And of the Roman conquest here...."

Within England of my heart, in the whole breadth of her delight, there
is no industrial city such as infests, ruins, and spoils other lands,
and in this she resembles her great and dear mother Italy. Like her,
too, she is full of very famous towns scarcely to be matched for beauty
and ancientness in the rest of the world, and their names which are
like the words of a great poet, and which it is a pleasure to me to
recite, are Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury, Bath,
Wells, Exeter, and her ports, whose names are as household words, even
in Barbary, are Dover, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, and Bristol.
All these she may well boast of, for what other land can match them
quite?

But there is a certain virtue of hers of which she is perhaps unaware,
that is nevertheless