“What a brave countenance!” he cried. “How honest, and thoughtful, and kindly! And what a pleasant shrewdness in the eyes! It is a perfect English face.”
“Oh, indeed!” said a scholarly man who stood by Miss Alida; “if Browning had an English body, his soul was that of some thirteenth-century Italian painter. Does he not say of himself:
‘Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it—“Italy.”’
Now it is a prejudice with me, that if an Englishman is to open his heart to us, we ought to find England written there. Shakespeare, who is at home with all people, is never so mighty and so lovable as when depicting the sweet-natured English ladies who became his ‘Imogenes,’ ‘Perditas,’ and ‘Helenas,’ or dallying with his own country wild-flowers, or in any way exalting England’s life and loveliness, majesty and power.”
“And pray, sir,” asked the Professor, “who but a man with an English heart could have written that home-yearning song:
‘Oh to be in England
Now that April’s there;
And whoever wakes in England,