A strange and abiding sense is love of Country! Though reason may revolt, and life here be hard, ugly, thankless, though one may even say, “I care no more for my own countrymen than for those of other lands; I am a citizen of the world!” No use! A stealing love has us fast bound; a web of who knows what memories of misty fields, and scents of clover and turned earth; of summer evenings, when sounds are far and clear; of long streets half-lighted, and town sights, not beautiful but homely; of the skies we were born beneath, and the roads we have trodden all our lives. What memories, too, of names and tales, small visions all upside down perhaps, yet true and warm to us because we listened and saw when we were no older than foals at their dams’ heels. It is not our actual Country, but its halo, that we love—the halo each one of us has made for it. There are evenings under the moon, dewy mornings, late afternoons, when over field and wood, over moor or park or town, unearthliness hovers; so, over our native land hovers a glamour that burns brighter when we are absent, and flames up in glory above her when we see her driven or hard pressed. No man yet knows the depths of our love for these islands of the blessed. May no man ever know it! And to each of us there will be some ingle-nook where the spirit of our country most inhabits, where the fire of hearth and home glows best, and draws us with its warmth from wanderings bodily or spiritual. To know that in these isles no native-born but has a quiet shrine, be it lovely, or devoid of earthly beauty, where he or she in fancy worships the whole land, gives reality to the word Patriotism. This love of country is so deep and sacred that we cannot utter it; let us not forget that it is as deep and sacred to the natives of other lands! Looking back into the dark of history, how quaint is our origin—offspring of invading robbers, wave after wave, for some two thousand years before the Norman Conquest! If these be not in truth the blessed islands that the ancients dreamed of, they seem to have been sufficiently attractive. Who our Neolithic forerunners were, whence they came, or whether they were here before our isles cut loose from the mainland and set out on an endless voyage, we shall never, I suppose, know. A strain of their blood, more than we think perhaps, must still be alive within us; the rest of it is freebooting fluid—Celts and Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, all robbers; blent at last—and in Ireland not yet quite blent—to the observance of honour among thieves.