’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 the 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