I was not actually in necessity, as I had still sufficient funds left to defray my bare living expenses for some months, with strict economy; but I had not come to America merely to exist! I had left home to make my fortune, I tell you; and, how could I be satisfied at this state of things? I was losing time, day by day; and not approaching one whit nearer to the object of my life!
In addition to these reflections, I had found out the truth of the time-honoured maxim, “coelum non animam mutant qui trans mare currunt.”—I might go from the old world to the new; but I could not leave my old memories, my old thoughts behind me!
At first, the novelty of things about me distracted my attention.
I was in a strange country amongst fresh faces, all connected only with the present, so that, I had little time to look back on the past.
Besides, I was hopeful of carving out a new career for myself; and hope is a sworn antagonist to retrospection.
But, as I began to get used to the place and people, never-forgotten scenes and associations came back to mind, which I felt were more difficult to banish now, three thousand miles away, than when I was on the spot with which they had been connected.
Oh! how, bustled about amidst a crowd of unsympathising strangers, to whom our domestic life is only an ideality, I longed for the quiet and charm and love of an English home!
I think that your wanderers and prodigals and black sheep, little though you may believe it, appreciate family union and social ties much more than your steady-going respectables who never stray without the routine circle of upright existence; never err; are never banned as outcasts!
The former look upon “home”—what a world does the very name convey to one who has never known what it is!—much as Moore’s “Peri” regarded Paradise, and as the lost angels may wistfully think of the heaven from which they were expelled. Perhaps they overrate its attributes, imagining, as they do, that it is a blissful state of being, for ever debarred to them; but they do have such feelings—the dregs, probably, of their bitter nature!
I can speak to the point, for, I was one of this class.