For St George's Day: From The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White

It was England that came out slowly as the late moon rose: his royal realm of Gramary. Stretched at his feet, she spread herself away into the remotest north, leaning towards the imagined Hebrides. 

She was his homely land. The moon made her trees more important for their shadows than for themselves, picked out the silent rivers in quicksilver, smoothed the toy pasture fields, laid a soft haze on everything. 

But he felt that he would have known the country, even without the light. He knew that there must be the Severn, there the Downs and there the Peak: all invisible to him, but inherent in his home. 

In this field a white horse must be grazing, in that some washing must be hanging on a hedge. It had a necessity to be itself.

He suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was.