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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