do not envy
you. I should pity you did I not know that the mind will make friends
with anything." But Wordsworth, the Laker, was quite as clearly born at
home as Lamb, the Londoner; and, as we know, he came back to his native
hills after no long wanderings, not to quit them again. It is because
Lamb hardly wandered at all that he seems so truly autochthonous, so
peculiarly a child of the soil. He struck deep root into the
intellectual alluvium of London, and until he was fifty years old he
suffered nothing from transplantation except when he changed his
lodgings or paid his somewhat reluctant visits to friends in the
country; and when, at fifty, he ventured away from London, it was no
further than to the margin of the city of Paradise--to Enfield,
Edmonton--the latter a place which he calls "a little teasing image of
a town," where "the country folks do not look like country folks," and
where "the very blackguards are degenerate." It was only in London that
Lamb's spirit really nourished itself and grew.

And why is it in old countries that the mind seems to strike its most
vigorous fibres into the soil, to draw up its most potent juices,
bringing to blossom such flowers as Wordsworth's "Poems of Childhood,"
such pansies as Elia's thoughts? Lamb suggests country images; even
though he was of the city, his essays have an outdoor freshness and
tenderness. They take us into the open fields, and show us the soft
counterchange of shadows and sunlight, bright spaces and pursuing
swarths of shade. And where did he learn the longing homesickness of a
child for the country? "How I would wake weeping," Elia says, "and in
the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne, in Wiltshire!"
Whether in country or city, surely it is in old lands that one gets the
fullest home feeling, the complete benefits of soil, and atmosphere,
and acquaintance with the various geniuses of the place. Would that we
had been Londoners, we say, to know the ancient streets, or Parisians
for the sake of the great libraries and of Notre Dame!

That, however, is but a melancholy _utinam_; there has been no lack of
fortunate migrations among people who have been born far away from
their fitting homes, and who have found their way thither in course of
time. So the "rising young men" of our own colonial days returned to
England to make their career; and sometimes we may trace the features
of their childhood's "environment" in their developed genius. Our
pain