Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti
Sydney Dobell (1824–1874)England (from Balder)
T
This happy England, loud with brooks and birds,
Shining with harvests, cool with dewy trees
And bloomed from hill to dell; but whose best flowers
Are daughters, and Ophelia still more fair
Than any rose she weaves; whose noblest floods
The pulsing torrent of a nation’s heart;
Whose forests stronger than her native oaks
Are living men; and whose unfathomed lakes
For ever calm the unforgotten dead
In quiet graveyards willowed seemly round,
O’er which To-day bends sad, and sees his face.
Whose rocks are rights, consolidate of old
Through unremembered years, around whose base
The ever-surging peoples roll and roar
Perpetual, as around her cliffs the seas
That only wash them whiter; and whose mountains
Souls that from this mere footing of the earth
Lift their great virtues thro’ all clouds of Fate
Up to the very heavens, and make them rise
To keep the gods above us!