overmastering emotion seized upon the boy, soul and body; his
heart beat so thickly that he could not breathe; the scene swam before
his eyes; the sun seemed to wheel round and round, and throw off, as it
turned, strange shapes which disappeared with the rapidity of thought,
and were succeeded by others. Will covered his face with his hands, and
burst into a violent fit of tears; and the poor miller, sadly
disappointed and perplexed, saw nothing better for it than to take him up
in his arms and carry him home in silence.

From that day forward Will was full of new hopes and longings. Something
kept tugging at his heart-strings; the running water carried his desires
along with it as he dreamed over its fleeting surface; the wind, as it
ran over innumerable tree-tops, hailed him with encouraging words;
branches beckoned downward; the open road, as it shouldered round the
angles and went turning and vanishing fast and faster down the valley,
tortured him with its solicitations. He spent long whiles on the
eminence, looking down the rivershed and abroad on the fat lowlands, and
watched the clouds that travelled forth upon the sluggish wind and
trailed their purple shadows on the plain; or he would linger by the
wayside, and follow the carriages with his eyes as they rattled downward
by the river. It did not matter what it was; everything that went that
way, were it cloud or carriage, bird or brown water in the stream, he
felt his heart flow out after it in an ecstasy of longing.

We are told by men of science that all the ventures of mariners on the
sea, all that counter-marching of tribes and races that confounds old
history with its dust and rumour, sprang from nothing more abstruse than
the laws of supply and demand, and a certain natural instinct for cheap
rations. To any one thinking deeply, this will seem a dull and pitiful
explanation. The tribes that came swarming out of the North and East, if
they were indeed pressed onward from behind by others, were drawn at the
same time by the magnetic influence of the South and West. The fame of
other lands had reached them; the name of the eternal city rang in their
ears; they were not colonists, but pilgrims; they travelled towards wine
and gold and sunshine, but their hearts were set on something higher.
That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of humanity that makes all
high achievements and all miserable failure, the same that spread wings
with Icarus, the same that