Oh, to be in England
        Now that April’s there,
      And whoever wakes in England
      Sees, some morning, unaware,
    That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
    Round the elm-tree hole are in tiny leaf,
    While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
          In England—­now!

    And after April, when May follows,
    And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! 
    Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
    Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
    Blossoms and dewdrops—­at the bent spray’s edge—­
    That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
    Lest you should think he never could recapture
    The first fine careless rapture! 
    And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
    All will be gay, when noontide wakes anew
    The buttercups, the little children’s dower;
    —­Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

So it runs; but it is only a momentary memory; and he knew, when he had done it, and to his great comfort, that he was far away from England.  But when Tennyson writes of Italy—­as, for instance, in Mariana in the South—­how apart he is!  How great is his joy when he gets back to England!

Then, again, when Browning was touched by the impulse to write about a great deed in war, he does not choose, like Tennyson, English subjects.  The Cavalier Tunes have no importance as patriot songs.  They are mere experiments.  The poem, How They brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, has twice their vigour.  His most intense war-incident is taken from the history of the French wars under Napoleon.  The most ringing and swiftest poem of personal dash and daring—­and at sea, as if he was tired of England’s mistress-ship of the waves—­a poem one may set side by side with the fight of The Revenge, is Herve Riel.  It is a tale of a Breton sailor saving the French fleet from the English, with the sailor’s mockery of England embedded in it; and Browning sent the hundred pounds he got for it to the French, after the siege of Paris.

It was not that he did not honour his country, but that, as an artist, he loved more the foreign lands; and that in his deepest life he belonged less to England than to the world of man.  The great deeds of England did not prevent him from feeling, with as much keenness as Tennyson felt those of England, the great deeds of France and Italy.  National self-sacrifice in critical hours, splendid courage in love and war, belonged, he thought, to all peoples.  Perhaps he felt, with Tennyson’s insularity dominating his ears, that it was as well to put the other side.  I think he might have done a little more for England.  There is only one poem, out of all his huge production, which recognises the great deeds of our Empire in war; and this did not come of a life-long feeling, such as he had for Italy, but from a sudden impulse which arose in him, as sailing by, he saw Trafalgar and Gibraltar, glorified and incarnadined by a battle-sunset: