"I could lie down, like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear!"
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 Jodeller!