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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 among her greatest delights: I mean her infinite
variety. Thus she is a true country, not a province; indeed, she is
made up of many counties and provinces, and each is utterly different
from other, and their different genius may be caught by the attentive
in their names, which are Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset,
Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and
Berkshire. Her variety thus lies in them and their dear, and let us
hope, immortal differences and characteristics, their genius that is,
which is as various as their scenery. For England of my heart not only
differs fundamentally from every other country of the known world,
but from itself in its different parts, and that radically. Thus in
one part you have ranges of chalk-hills, such as no other land knows,
so regular, continuous, and tremendous withal, that you might think
some army of archangels--and such might well abide there--had thrown
them up as their vast and beautiful fortifications, being good Romans
and believing in the value of such things, and not as the heathen
despising them. These chalk downs are covered, as indeed becomes
things so old, with turf, the smoothest, softest, and sweetest under
the sun.

There are other hills also that catch the breath, and these be those
of the west. They all bear the beautiful names of home, as Mendip,
Quantock, Brendon, and Cotswold. And as there are hills, so there are
plains, plains uplifted, such as that great silent grassland above
Salisbury, plains lonely, such as the Weald and the mysterious marsh
of Romney in the east by which all good things go out of England, as
the legions went, and, as, alas, the Faith went too, another Roman
thing many hundred years ago. There is also that great marsh in the
west by the lean and desolate sea, more mysterious by far, whence a
man may see far off the great and solemn mountains of another land.
By that marsh the Faith came into England of my heart, and there lies
in ruin the greatest of its shrines in loving but alien hands, and
desolate.

I have said nothing of the valleys: they are too many and too fair,
from the fairest of all through which Thames flows seaward, to those
innumerable and more beloved where are for sure our homes. I say
nothing of the rivers, for who could number them? Yet I will tell you
of some if only for the beauty of their names, passing the names of
all women but ours, as Thames itself, and Medway, Stour, and Ouse and
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