THE BOOK OF THE HOMELESS
being collected by the people themselves, from the poorest homes, towards the support of the Belgian colony in the neighbouring village of Ambleside.
One sits and ponders these things, as the golden light recedes from Loughrigg, and that high crag above Wordsworth's cottage. Little Grasmere has indeed done all she could, and in this lovely valley, the heart of Wordsworth's people, the descendants of those dalesmen and daleswomen whom he brought into literature, is one—passionately one—with the heart of the Allies. Lately the war has bitten harder into the life of the village. Of its fifty young sons, many are now in the thick of the Dardanelles struggle; three are prisoners of war, two are said to have gone down in the Royal Edward, one officer has fallen, others are wounded.
Grasmere has learnt much geography and history this last year; and it has shared to the full in the general deepening and uplifting of the English soul, which the war has brought about. France, that France which Wordsworth loved in his first generous youth, is in all our hearts,—France, and the sufferings of France ; Belgium, too, the trampled and outraged victim of a Germany eternally dishonoured. And where shall we find nobler words in which to clothe the feeling of England towards a France which has lost Rheims, or a Belgium which has endured Louvain, than those written a hundred years ago in that cottage across the lake.?
Air, earth and skies—
There 's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies.
And love, and man's unconquerable mind!
To Germany, then, the initial weight of big battalions, the initial successes of a murderous science: to the nations leagued against her, the unconquerable power of those moral faiths which fire our clay, and in the end mould the history of men!
…Along the mountain-side, the evening wind rises. The swell and
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