This is the Border-land!  Look up the purpled steeps of these heathered hills.  The white lambs are looking, with their soft, meek eyes, into the grass-choked mouths of the rusty and dismantled cannon of the war of nationalities between England and Scotland.  The deed has been consummated.  The valor and patriotism of Wallace and Bruce could not prevent it.  The sheep of English and Scotch shepherds feed side by side on these mountain heights, in spite of Stirling and Bannockburn, of Flodden and Falkirk.  The Iron Horse, bearing the blended arms of the two realms on his shield, walks over those battle-fields by night and day, treading their memories deeper and deeper in the dust.  The lambs are playing in the sun on the boundary line of the two dominions.  Does a Scot of to-day love his native land less than the Campbell clansman or clan-chief in Bruce’s time?  Not a whit.  He carries a heartful of its choicest memories with him into all countries of his sojourning.  But there is a larger sentiment that includes all these filial feelings towards his motherland, while it draws additional warmth and strength from them.  It is the sentiment of Imperial Nationality; the feeling of a Briton, that does not extinguish nor absorb, nor compete with, the Scot in his heart;—­the feeling that he is a political constituent of a mighty nation, whose feet stand upon all the continents of the earth, while it holds the best islands of the sea in its hands;—­the feeling with which he says We with all the millions of a dominion on which the sun never sets, and Our, when he speaks of its grand and common histories, its hopes, prospects, progress, power and aspirations.

There was a Border-land, dark and bloody, between Saxon England and Celtic Wales.  For centuries the red foot-marks of savage conflict scarred and covered its wild waste.  Never before did so small a people make so stout, and desperate and protracted struggle for local independence and isolation.  Never did one produce a more strong-hearted and blind-eyed patriotism, or patriotism more poets to thrill the listeners to their lays with the intoxicating fanaticism of a national sentiment.  On that Border-land the white lambs now lie in the sun.  The Welsh sentiment is as strong as ever in the Snowdon shepherd, and he may not speak a dozen words of the English tongue.  But the Briton lives in his breast.  The feeling of its great meaning surrounds and illumines the inner circles of his local attachment.  He may never have seen a map of the Globe, and never have been outside the wall of the Welsh mountains; but he knows, without geography, who and what Queen Victoria is among the earth’s sovereigns, and the length and breadth of her sceptre’s reach and rule around the world.