Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/132

 national faith; and my father's religion was in the pocket of my native robe when I threw it overboard the first time I crossed the Atlantic.

Why then, I repeat, this chronic nostalgia? My local Deity forever calling? I might go there only to find the Temple in ruins. Nature's presents heaped at my door? The heart craves knowledge now, not affection; the torments of the understanding can not be wholly assuaged by the Beautiful. Do the toys of our childhood become in latter days the toys of our souls? Here., [sic] I think, I am nearer to the truth. For we must be as children again to be able to enjoy, from purest spiritual motive, our native soil and the enchanted scenes of our childly days and dreams. And the comely simplicity of childhood, its mystic innocense, is incarnate in the trees, the flowers, the streams and the hills of the mother-land. Everything a child touches in his holy years lives afterward in the pious memory a life of its own and is subject, like the flowers, to the vicissitudes