The inherent pathos of it, indeed, took him, as squarely as unexpectedly,
by the throat. He suffered a sharp recoil from the solicitation of the
future, an immense tenderness towards the past.--A tenderness for those
same years of tutelage and all they had brought him, not only in
over-flowing animal spirits, happy intercourse and intellectual
attainment; but in their limitation of private action, their security of
obligation, of obedience to authority, which at the time had seemed
irksome enough and upon release from which he had so recently
congratulated himself.
Love of home, of England, of his own people--of the Archdeacon, in even
his most full-voiced and moralizing mood--love of things tested,
accustomed and friendly, touched him to the quick. Suddenly he asked
himself to what end was he leaving all these and going forth to encounter
untried conditions, an unknown Nature, a moral and social order equally
unknown? Looking at the peaceful, ethereally lovely landscape, set in
such close proximity and notable contrast to the unrest of that historic
highway of the nations, the Channel sea, he felt small and lonely,
childishly diffident and weak.
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