THE HOMELESS
We are a nomadic race, thriving on change. Apartment houses are our tents: many of us preempt a new flat every moving day. This is in part an inheritance from our pioneer readiness to strike camp and go further. It is the adaptability of a restless seeking. It is also the gift made by limitless supplies of immigrants, who, having torn up their roots from places where their family line had lived for a thousand years, pass from street to street, and from city to city, of the new country, with no heavy investment of affection in the local habitation. Once the silver cord of ancestral memory is loosened, there is little in the new life to bind it together. The wanderer flows on with the flowing life about him. To many of us it would be an effort of memory to tell where we were living ten years ago. The outline of the building is already dim.
The peasant of France has found a truth of life in planting himself solidly in one place, with an abiding love for his own people, for the house and the village where he was born. Four centuries ago the French poet wrote:
Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la Toison
Et puis est retourné plein d'usage et raison
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge.
Quand revoiray-je hélas! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage.
Plus me plaist le sejour qu'out basty mes ayeux
Que des palais romains le front audacieux
Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine.
Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre latin
Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin
Et plus que l'air marin la douceur Angevine.
Happy the man who like Ulysses has traveled far and wide,
Or like that other who won the Golden Fleece,
And then wended home full worn and full wise,
To spend among his own folk the remainder of his days.
When shall I see once more alack! above my little hamlet
Rise the chimney smoke, and in what season of the year
Shall I see once more the garden of my humble home,
Which is a wide province in my eyes, and even more.
Dearer to my heart is the home my forefathers built
Than the cloud-capped tops of haughty Roman palaces.
Dearer than hardest marble the fine slate of my roof.