The most ringing and swiftest poem of personal dash and daring--and at sea, as if he was tired of England's mistress-ship of the waves--a poem one may set side by side with the fight of _The Revenge_, is _Herve Riel_.

It is a tale of a Breton sailor saving the French fleet from the English, with the sailor's mockery of England embedded in it; and Browning sent the hundred pounds he got for it to the French, after the siege of Paris.
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.