ittle flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air
upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever more slowly to the
murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on June
afternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of
the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or
so, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we
afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions
and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth
wax, of our ingenuous souls, as "with lead in the rock for ever,"
giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our
memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with
us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise. The realities and
passions, the rumours of the greater world without, steal in upon us,
each by its own special little passage-way, through the wall of custom
[178] about us; and never afterwards quite detach themselves from this
or that accident, or trick, in the mode of their first entrance to us.
Our susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, manifold
experiences--our various experiences of the coming and going of bodily
pain, for instance--belong to this or the other well-remembered place
in the material habitation--that little white room with the window
across which the heavy blossoms could beat so peevishly in the wind,
with just that particular catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in
it, on gusty mornings; and the early habitation thus gradually becomes
a sort of material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment; a system of
visible symbolism interweaves itself through all our thoughts and
passions; and irresistibly, little shapes, voices, accidents--the angle
at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow--become parts of the
great chain wherewith we are bound.

Thus far, for Florian, what all this had determined was a peculiarly
strong sense of home--so forcible a motive with all of us--prompting to
us our customary love of the earth, and the larger part of our fear of
death, that revulsion we have from it, as from something strange,
untried, unfriendly; though life-long imprisonment, they tell you, and
final banishment from home is a thing bitterer still; the looking
forward to but a short space, a mere childish gouter and dessert of it,
before the end, being so great a resource of [179] effort to pilgrims
and wayfarers, and the soldier in di