Somehow my heart keeps flying back to my birthplace as Antony's kept flying back to Egypt. If a man has no heart, if he is altogether lacking in veneration the attention given to his birthplace by other persons would impress it upon his notice. "Where were you born?" asks the life insurance agent. What has that to do with it? How does that affect the situation? Why does he not limit himself to vital statistics, like your age, habits, general health? Through more than three thousand closely printed pages, Who's Who in America, carefully mentions in each biography the birthplace of the subject. There must be some reason for making this one of the chief facts when the space is needed to tell of positions held, wealth and fame acquired.
At this point a daily paper comes to my desk containing an interesting recital touching America the Beautiful. We are informed that Miss Bates "has a most sympathetic personality" and "is a native of Falmouth on Cape Cod." Are the song and person better or different from that which they would have been if instead of Falmouth the birthplace had been Yarmouth or Barnstable or Wellfleet Several towns in France are disputing the honor of being the birthplace of General Foch. The papers and magazines speak of his genius, of his responsible position, the most distinguished in military history, of his never-resting blow-on-blow method of conquering, but they cut the thread of an interesting narrative short, to consider the question of his birthplace as if that, after all, was a principal question. It seems that "the Lord shall count when he writeth up the people that this man was born there." Agents and learned men, and it appears even the deity, attach significance to the place of one's birth. So then will I.
"Dear native village, I foretell,
Though for a time I say farewell,
That wheresoe'er my steps shall tend,
And whensoe'er my course shall end,
My soul will cast the backward view,
THE LONGING look alone on you."
But there are spots on the sun. There's a fly in the ointment. I am suffering from an incurable complaint. I was born too soon. I cannot now put the clock back. Besides we are entering on a new era. There is to be an overturning. Society and the ways of government and the methods of business are to be changed and I want to be a witness and would like to be a factor. The temper of each generation is a surprise. This new period is to be different in its ideals, employments, and conditions and I would like to be entirely of it.
Footprints on the Sands of Time
I took up the other day a book of fiction that is equally the delight of the child and of the man and opened it where a picture represented the surprise of Robinson Crusoe at discovering the print of a man's foot on the seashore. On revisiting the earth it touches one's emotion after being orphaned, islanded, for a generation from one's father to come upon his footprints in his old haunts. Without the experience of it, on visiting an early home, no one would imagine, what a shadowy train of memory, involving all the past, would come crowding before his eyes, filling his heart with a pleasant pain, and a sweet bitterness. Only once stand in the old environment and feel the atmosphere of early living conditions and a vivid panorama of faces that it was thought had vanished and scenes that it was supposed had faded will unroll "when fond recollection presents them to view." I hardly realized how sweet those memories were to me until my visit. I began to see that one must get away from home, be exiled for a while, to gain a pensive mood. Homesickness is in reality a spiritual instinct, a needed, useful force. Howard Payne felt its power when living in a garret in Paris, on the edge of starvation, he longed for his "lowly thatched cottage again," as David longed for a drink of the water of the well of his birthplace, which is by the gate of Bethlehem. This locality was the playground of my childhood. It is connected with the sweetest ties that can bind one's thoughts to the past. I stand in a fixed position. This is the location of my earliest recollection. Here memory began. This was a new birth. Commencing in the community and continuing all along thereafter, by inquiry, I have sought widely to ascertain at what point in the lives of other persons, recollection made a start. From his biography by his daughter I learn that my whilom instructor, Professor Austin Phelps, remembered Napoleon's death, an event that occurred when he was two. Franklin says he was a reader from his infancy. Samuel Johnson, before he was two, had begun to take a permanent hold upon events. One of my associates recalls a theatric incident that occurred when he was two. My recollection made no registration until after I was three and this was a scene here in my father's new unfinished church, and among its primitive temporary seats which were without backs. Thus I stand where my outlook on the world began. At that point I see myself for the first time in my career. Other events follow in close order but it has been a great pleasure that my angel mother and her beloved church are ineffaceably pictured on the front page of my book of remembrance.
Things Sweet to Remember
To discover that modest House of Prayer in which my father began his ministry was like a miracle, like finding someone who had risen from the dead. My eye was not satisfied with seeing it twice or thrice. I contemplated it as I would the "House not made with hands," I could have kneeled and kissed the threshold of this historic but very lowly temple. It seemed a construction transported, ready-built into this world and located in one of its most delightful spots. It seemed different, like a piece of meteoric stone which for a fact appears here but whose home has been in the skies, and like the stony pillow on Judea's plain it became to my vision a House of God. This is a holy land to me. It savors of the assemblies of the saints. If I were looking for beauty I would return to that divine abode. A stranger not knowing the antecedents of the little sanctuary would discern no form nor comeliness in it. It was an hour when one could think of but two things, one was home, and one was heaven. These earthly objects have a comeliness, a simple dignity, and nattiness which are beyond the reach of art. How it elevates the spirit to stand, thrilled by a beautiful romance and find that it is not romance at all but unspeakably sacred reality.
"Aye call it holy ground
The soil where first they trod."