and only the nation which, at each moment of political or social evolution, looks lovingly backward to its own painfully-earned experience—Respiciens, Prospiciens, as Tennyson’s own chosen device expresses it—has solid reason to hope, that its movement is true Advance—that its course is Upward.
* * * * *
It remains only to add, that the book has been carefully revised and corrected, and that nineteen pieces published in the original volume of 1881 are not reprinted in the present issue.
F. T. P.
July, 1889
THE VISIONS OF ENGLAND
PRELUDE
CAESAR TO EGBERT
1
England, fair England! Empress isle of isles!
—Round whom the loving-envious ocean plays,
Girdling thy feet with silver and with smiles,
Whilst all the nations crowd thy liberal bays;
With rushing wheel and heart of fire they come,
Or glide and glance like white-wing’d doves that know
And seek their proper home:—
England! not England yet! but fair as now,
When first the chalky strand was stirr’d by Roman prow.
2