Tom of certain water-colour drawings, by Danvers and by Appleyard,
hanging in the drawing-room of the big house at Canton Magna, and of
certain of Shelley's lyrics--both of which, in their different medium,
breathed the same enchantment of natural and spiritual loveliness, of
nameless desire, nameless regret. And, his nerves being somewhat strained
by the emotions of the day, that enchantment worked upon him strangely.
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. All the established safety and comfort of
home, all the thoughtless irresponsible delights of vanished boyhood,
pulled at his heart-strings. He wanted, wanted wildly, desperately, not
to go forward but to go back.

Mind and body being healthy, however, the phase was a passing one, and