Arun and Rother; Itchen and Test, Hampshire streams; and those five
which are like the fingers of an outstretched hand about Salisbury in
the meads, Bourne and Avon and Wylye and Nadder and Ebble; and those
of the West, Brue, which is holiest of all, though all be holy, Exe
and Barle, Dart and Taw, Fal under the sloping woods, Tamar, which is
an eastern girdle to a duchy, and Camel, which kissed the feet of
Iseult, and is lost ere it finds the sea.

Of the uplifted moorlands which are a part of the mystery of the west,
of the forests, of the greenwood, of the meads, of the laughing coast,
white as with dawn in the east, darkling in the west, I know not how
to speak, for in England of my heart we take them for granted and are
satisfied. They fill all that quiet and fruitful land with their own
joy and beneficence, and are a part of God's pleasure. Because of them
the name of England of my heart might be but Happiness, or--as for
ages we have named that far-off dusky Arabia,--Anglia Felix.

And yet, perhaps, the chief thing that remains with the mere sojourner
in this country of mine, the true Old England, is that in the whole
breadth of it, it is one vast graveyard. Do you not know those long
barrows that cast their shadows at evening upon the lonely downs,
those round tumuli that are dark even in the sun, where lie the men of
the old time before us, our forefathers? Do you not know the grave of
the Roman, the mystery that seems to lurk outside the western gate of
the forgotten city that was once named in the Roman itinerary and now
is nothing? Do you not know many an isolated hill often dark with
pines, but, more often still, lonely and naked where they lie of whom
we are come, with their enemies, and they call the place Battlebury or
Danesbury, or for ever deserted like all battlefields it is nameless?
If you know not these you know not England of my heart, though you
know those populous graveyards about the village churches where the
grass is so lush and green and the dead are more than the living;
though you know that marvellous tomb, the loveliest thing in all my
country, where the first Earl of Salisbury lies in the nave of the
great church he helped to build; though you know that wonder by the
roadside where Somerset and Wiltshire meet; though you know the
beauty that is fading and crumbling in the little church under the
dark woods where the dawn first strikes the roots of the Quantock
Hills.

There is so much