Two languages, many dialects,
innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and
prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme
east and west of that great continent of America. When I am at
home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man
from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in
some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or
the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the
instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic,
and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not
among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English,
or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each
other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each
one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly
people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country,
with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains;
its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour,
unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city,
where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the
salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live
there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out,
"Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty
under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can
repay me for my absence from my country.
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