Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/202

186 country, more than Dante and Dante's country, more even than Shakespeare and Shakespeare's country."

After urging that non-intervention in a neighbour's affairs may be carried too far, may only mean passing by on the other side when that neighbour has fallen among thieves, she earnestly entreats her countrymen to "put away the Little Pedlingtonism, unworthy of a great nation, and too prevalent among us. If the man who does not look beyond this natural life is of a somewhat narrow order," she argues, "what must be the man who does not look beyond his own frontier or his own sea?"

"I confess," she exclaims, in language of real poetic grandeur, and with a visionary hope of what appears not yet very near unto realisation, "I confess that I dream of the day when an English statesman shall arise with a heart too large for England; having courage in the face of his countrymen to assert of some suggested policy, 'This is good for your trade; this is necessary for your domination; but it will vex a people hard by, it will hurt a people further off, it will profit nothing to the general humanity; therefore, away with it—it is not for you or for me.' When a British minister dares speak so, and when a British public applauds him speaking, then shall the nation be glorious, and her praise, instead of exploding from within from loud civic mouths, come to her from without, as all worthy praise must, from the alliances she has fostered, and the populations she has saved."

Some of the poems in the volume thus heralded certainly contained a few bitter allusions to England, and contrasted her conduct, and of course not to her advantage, with that of France. Yet, that there was very much in the book to arouse the wrath Mrs.