And yet she is ours after all; she belongs to us, is more perhaps our
very likeness and self than the capital of any other people. What is
Berlin but a brutalised village, or Paris now but cosmopolis, or Rome
but a universe? She is ours, the very gate of England of my heart. For
she stands there striding the boundary of my country, the greatest of
our cities, the greatest even of our industrial cities--a negative to
all the rest. To the North she says Nay continually, for she is
English, the greater successor of Winchester, and in her voice is the
soul of the South, the real England, the England of my heart.
Ah, we have never known her or loved her enough or understood that she
is a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the
prepared beauty of mortal places. Indeed, she has something of the
character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its
infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it.
Almost featureless if you will, she is always under the guidance of
her ample sky, responding immediately to every mood of the clouds; and
in her, beauty grows up suddenly out of life and is gone e'er we can
apprehend it.
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