Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;
    Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
    Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
    In the dimmest North-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;
    “Here and here did England help me:  how can I help England?”—­say. 
    Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
    While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

It is a little thing, and when it leaves the sunset it is poor.  And there is twice the fervour of its sunset in the description of the sunrise at Asolo in Pippa Passes.

Again, there is scarcely a trace in his work of any vital interest in the changes of thought and feeling in England during the sixty years of his life, such as appear everywhere in Tennyson.  No one would know from his poetry (at least until the very end of his life, when he wrote Francis Furini) that the science of life and its origins had been revolutionised in the midst of his career, or, save in A Death in the Desert, that the whole aspect of theology had been altered, or that the democratic movement had taken so many new forms.  He showed to these English struggles neither attraction nor repulsion.  They scarcely existed for him—­transient elements of the world, merely national, not universal.  Nor did the literature or art of his own country engage him half so much as the literature and art of Italy.  He loved both.  Few were better acquainted with English poetry, or reverenced it more; but he loved it, not because it was English, but of that world of imagination which has no special country.  He cared also for English art, but he gave all his personal love to the art of Italy.  Nor does he write, as Tennyson loved to do, of the daily life of the English farmer, squire, miller and sailor, and of English sweet-hearting, nor of the English park and brook and village-green and their indwellers, but of the work-girl at Asolo, and the Spanish monk in his garden, and the Arab riding through the desert, and of the Duchess and her servant flying through the mountains of Moldavia, and of the poor painters at Fano and Florence, and of the threadbare poet at Valladolid, and of the peasant-girl who fed the Tuscan outlaw, and of the poor grammarian who died somewhere in Germany (as I think Browning meant it), and of the Jews at Rome, and of the girl at Pornic with the gold hair and the peasant’s hand, and of a hundred others, none of whom are English.  All his common life, all his love-making, sorrow and joy among the poor, are outside this country, with perhaps two exceptions; and neither of these has the English note which sounds so soft and clear in Tennyson.  This is curious enough, and it is probably one of the reasons why English people for a long time would have so little to do with him.  All the same, he was himself woven of England even more than of Italy.  The English