ggles between the daily cares of him who carves
out his own career and fortune, yet he has never experienced the darkest
poverty of fate who has not felt what it is to be a wanderer, without a
country to lay claim to. Of all the desolations that visit us, this is the
gloomiest and the worst. The outcast from the land of his fathers, whose
voice must never be heard within the walls where his infancy was nurtured,
nor his step be free upon the mountains where he gambolled in his youth,
this is indeed wretchedness. The instinct of country grows and strengthens
with our years; the joys of early life are linked with it; the hopes of
age point towards it; and he who knows not the thrill of ecstasy some
well-remembered, long-lost-sight-of place can bring to his heart when
returning after years of absence, is ignorant of one of the purest sources
of happiness of our nature.

With what a yearning of the heart, then, did I look upon the dim and misty
cliffs, that mighty framework of my island home, their stern sides lashed
by the blue waters of the ocean, and their summits lost within the clouds!
With what an easy and natural transition did my mind turn from the wild
mountains and the green valleys to their hardy sons, who toiled beneath
the burning sun of the Peninsula; and how, as some twinkling light of the
distant shore would catch my eye, did I wonder within myself whether
beside that hearth and board there might not sit some whose thoughts
were wandering over the sea beside the bold steeps of El Bodon, or the
death-strewn plain of Talavera,--their memories calling up some trait of
him who was the idol of his home; whose closing lids some fond mother had
watched over; above whose peaceful slumber her prayers had fallen; but
whose narrow bed was now beneath the breach of Badajos, and his sleep the
sleep that knows not waking!

I know not if in my sad and sorrowing spirit I did not envy him who thus
had met a soldier's fate,--for what of promise had my own! My hopes of
being in any way instrumental to my poor uncle's happiness grew hourly
less. His prejudices were deeply rooted and of long standing; to have asked
him to surrender any of what he looked upon as the prerogatives of his
house and name, would be to risk the loss of his esteem. What then remained
for me? Was I to watch, day by day and hour by hour, the falling ruin of
our fortunes? Was I to involve myself in the petty warfare of unavailing
resistance to the law? And