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:

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