e
Lake and mountain poetry come from distinct strains in his genius,
which our criticism may bring into relation, but our feeling insists on
keeping apart. His Grasmere is a province of Nature--her favoured
province--rather than of England; it is in the eye of Nature that the
old Cumberland beggar lives and dies; England only provides the
obnoxious workhouses to which these destitute vagrants were henceforth
to be consigned. Is it not this that divides our modern local poetry
from his? Mr. Belloc's Sussex is tenderly loved for itself; yet behind
its great hills and its old-world harbours lies the half-mystic presence
of historic England. And in Edward Thomas's wonderful old Wiltshireman,
Lob, worthy I think to be named with the Cumberland Beggar,

'An old man's face, by life and weather cut
And coloured,--rough, brown, sweet as any nut,--
A land face, sea-blue eyed,'--

you read the whole lineage of sterling English yeomen and woodlanders
from whom Lob springs.

This note is indeed relatively absent from the work of the venerable
master who has made 'Wessex' the most vividly realized of all English
provinces to-day, and whose prose Egdon Heath may well be put at the
head of all the descriptive poetry of our time. But Mr. Hardy, in this
respect, belongs to an earlier generation than that into which he
happily survives.

Sometimes this feeling is given in a single intense concentrated touch.
When Rupert Brooke tells us of

'Some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,'

do we not feel that the solidarity of England with the English folk and
of the English folk with the English soil, is burnt into our
imaginations in a new and distinctive way?

But the poetry of shires and provinces reacts too upon the poetry of
nationality. It infuses something of the more instinctive and
rudimentary attachments from which it springs into a passion peculiarly
exposed to the contagion of rhetoric and interest. Some of the most
strident voices among living nationalist poets have found an unexpected
note of tenderness when they sang their home province. Mr. Kipling
charms us when he tells, in his close-knit verse, of the 'wooded, dim,
Blue goodness of the Weald'. And the more strident notes of D'Annunzio's
patriotism are also assu