we not say that in
it the ideal of country is saturated with that imaginative grip of
reality in all its concrete energy and vivacity which I have called the
new realism? The nation is no abstraction, whether it be called
Britannia, or _Deutschland ueber Alles_. It is seen, and felt; seen in
its cities as well as in its mountains, in the workers who have made it,
as well as in the heroes who have defended it; in its roaring forges as
well as in its idyllic woodlands and its tales of battles long ago; and
all these not as separate strands in a woven pattern, but as waters of
different origin and hue pouring along together in the same great
stream.

Emile Verhaeren, six years before the invasion, had seen and felt his
country, living body and living soul, with an intensity which made it
seem unimaginable that she should be permanently subdued. He well called
his book _Toute la Flandre_, for all Flanders is there. Old
Flanders,--Artevelde and Charles Temeraire--whose soul was a forest of
huge trees and dark thickets,

'A wilderness of crossing ways below,
But eagles, over, soaring to the sun,'--

Van Eyck and Rubens--'a thunder of colossal memories'; then the great
cities, with their belfries and their foundries, and their warehouses
and laboratories, their antique customs and modern ambitions; and the
rivers, the homely familiar Lys, where the women wash the whitest of
linen, and the mighty Scheldt, the Escaut, the 'hero sombre, violent and
magnificent', 'savage and beautiful Escaut', whose companionship had
moulded and made the poet, whose rhythms had begotten his music and his
best ideas[17].

None of our English poets have rendered England in poetry with the same
lyric intensity in its whole compass of time and space, calling up into
light and music all her teeming centuries and peopled provinces. Yet the
present generation has in some respects made a nearer approach to such
achievement than its predecessors. A century of growing historic
consciousness has not passed over us in vain; and if any generic
distinction is to be found between our recent, often penetrating and
beautiful, poetry of the English countryside and the Nature description
of Wordsworth or of Ruskin, it is in the ground-tone of passion and
memory that pervades it for England herself. Wordsworth wrote
magnificently of England threatened with invasion, and magnificently of
the Lake Country, Nature's beloved haunt. But the War sonnets and th