Publisher's Synopsis
The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of being the end of the world. Itsextremity was ultima Thule, the other end of nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northernseas, were lit up at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was felt that the remotest remnant ofthings had been touched; and more for pride than possession.The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these realms upon the edge ofeverything there was really something that can only be called edgy. Britain is not so much an islandas an archipelago; it is at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries can one soeasily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the sea. The great rivers seem not only tomeet in the ocean, but barely to miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole, leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehistoric tradition has taught it to looktowards the sunset for islands yet dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with theirislands. Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the Scots, the English, theIrish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have something altogether different from the humdrumdocility of the inland Germans, or from the bon sens français which can be at will trenchant or trite.There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts of Union have not torn asunder.The nearest name for it is insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge ofthings. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex their critics and perplexthemselves. Their souls are fretted like their coasts. They have an embarrassment, noted by allforeigners: it is expressed, perhaps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the English by aconfusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a license with the symbol of language. But Bull's own bull, the English bull, is "a dumb ox of thought"; a standing mystification in the mind. There issomething double in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many waters. Of all peoples they areleast attached to the purely classical; the imperial plainness which the French do finely and theGermans coarsely, but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists and emigrants; theyhave the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile in their own country. Theyare torn between love of home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanationor may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line inEnglish literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems-"Over the hills and far away."
