For what profit did this warring against destiny bring me? Nothing—nothing, but the “vanity and vexation of spirit,” which a more believing soul than mine had apostrophised in agony, ages before I was born.
You may not credit the fact of the Swiss mountaineers pining of what is called “Home-woe,” when banished from their beloved glaciers, the same as Cyrus’s legions suffered from nostalgia; and, may put down the Frenchman’s maladie du pays, which some expatriated communists are probably experiencing now in New Caledonia, to blatant sentimentality; but they are each and all true expositions of feeling.
We Englishmen are generally prosaic; but some of us have known the terrible yearning which this home-sickness produces in us in foreign lands. The Devonshire shepherd will weep over the recollections which a little daisy will bring back to him of the old country of his childhood, when standing beneath an Australian gum tree. I have seen a Scotchman in America cherish a thistle, as if it were the rarest of plants, from its native associations; and I know of a potted shamrock which was brought all the way across the ocean in an emigrant ship, by an Irish miner, and which now adorns the window of a veranda-fronted cottage at the Pittsburgh mines in Pennsylvania!
Some of us are “sentimental,” you see. I can answer for myself, at least; and I know that the air of “Home, sweet Home,” has affected me quite as much as the “Ranz des Vaches” would appeal to the sensibilities of an Alpine Jödeller!
I got home-sick now. The passion took complete possession of me.
The burning, suffocating heat of the summer “in the States,” caused me to pant after the cool shade of the old Prebend’s walk at Saint Canon’s; and call to mind those inviting lawns and osiered eyots along the Thames, where I used to spend the warm evenings at home. I thought as Izaak Walton, the vicar’s favourite, had thought before me—that I would cheerfully sacrifice all hopes of worldly advancement, all dreams of fortune, all future success, problematical though each and all appeared—
So, I the fields and meadows green may view;
And daily by fresh rivers walk at will,
Among the daisies and violets blue,
Red hyacinth and yellow daffodil;
Purple narcissus, like the morning’s rays,
Pale gander grass and azure culver keys.
In the gorgeous Indian summer, when the nature of the New World seems to awake, dressing all the trees in fantastic foliage of varied hue, my fancies were recalled to a well-remembered Virginian creeper that ornamented the houses of the Terrace, where my darling lived; for its leafy colouring in the autumn was similar to that I now beheld—in the chrome-tinted maples, the silvery-toned beeches and scarlet “sumachs” of the western forests.
And in the frozen winter, of almost Arctic severity and continuance, home was brought even nearer to me—in connection with all the cherished memories of that kindly-tempered season. I thought of the old firesides where I had been a welcome guest in times past; the old Christmas festivities, the old Christmas cheer, the—bah! What good will it do to you and I thus to trace over the aching foot-prints of recollection?
I used to go down to the mouth of the Hudson river, that I might watch the red-funnelled Cunard steamers start on their passage to England—sending my heart after them in impotent cravings: I used, I remember, to mark off the days as they passed, in the little almanack of my pocket-book—scoring them out, just as Robinson Crusoe was in the habit of notching his post for the same purpose:—I used to fret and fret, in fact, eating my soul away in vain repinings and foolish longings!