I remember that long ago when I used to be made to memorize Campbell's sentimental lines on The Exile, beginning,
"There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin"--
they only called forth my unsympathetic infantile jeers; but last spring I went home. Suddenly, as we passed along the tawny marshes lying like great dun lions by the edge of the misty gulf, I realized that for twenty discontented years I too had been suffering the pangs of the Exile. Memories and emotions, so long disused as to be almost forgotten, boiled up with the impetuosity of geysers. Possessions of my secret life that I think I was never really conscious of at all came to life. I haven't the least idea, for example, why the buoyant feathery boughs of the first Southern cedar I saw made me strongly wish to weep lovely, sentimental tears, but I knew at once why I had invariably felt bored with the conventional admiration of mountains. Why, indeed, _should_ scenery only be important when perpendicular? To my mind, to have the landscape getting up on its hind legs and hiding the view is simply tiresome. Here one could see everything--could open one's lungs and breathe what the Creoles used to call _la grande air_, and let one's heart go out to the land.
You blessed mother country! Those people where I have lived so long seem not to care particularly for their birthplaces. Their patriotism is satisfied by an immense political abstraction and a striped flag. I have always suspected that if one took off the heads of such folk and looked down inside one would find inside only wheels and coiled springs, instead of flesh and blood. David Yandell used to say, "I'm for the Yandells against the whole world, but if it's between the Yandells and Dave, then I'm for Dave!" One might be for that political abstraction against the world, but between that abstraction and Louisiana, then I'm for Louisiana.
I began to suspect too that some of my heresies and revolts had really been caused by the bitterness of exile, though from the very beginning I have seen the King without his mantle. When my elders handed out to me the accepted platitudes in answer to my early attempts to realize the world in which I moved, I stared at them "in a wild surmise," the aforesaid conventionalities appearing to me to be so at variance with the facts as I saw them. They appeared to me--these elders--to be imagining a King's cloak to cover the world as it really was; to be neglecting and minimizing the things really worth while; to be inventing ideals and standards not in themselves noble.