A Writer's Recollections — Volume 1 by Mrs. Humphry Ward
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page 15 of 169 (08%)
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was in broad outline drawn from my father, and the impression made by
his idealist, enthusiastic youth upon his comrades. And Philip's migration to the Antipodes at the end--when he rounded the sphere to New Zealand, There he hewed and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit-- was certainly suggested by my father's similar step in 1847, the year before the poem appeared. Only in my father's life there had been as yet no parallel to the charming love-story of "The Bothie." His love-story awaited him on the other side of the world. At that moment, New Zealand, the land of beautiful mountain and sea, with its even temperate climate, and its natives whom English enthusiasm hoped not only to govern, but to civilize and assimilate, was in the minds of all to whom the colonies seemed to offer chances of social reconstruction beyond any that were possible in a crowded and decadent Europe. "Land of Hope," I find it often called in these old letters. "The gleam" was on it, and my father, like Browning's Waring, heard the call. After it; follow it. Follow the gleam! He writes to his mother in August, 1847, from the Colonial Office: Every one whom I meet pities me for having to return to London at this dull season, but to my own feelings, it is not worse than at other times. The things which would make me loathe the thought of passing my life or even several years in London, do not depend on |
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