And why is it in old countries that the mind seems to strike its most vigorous fibres into the soil, to draw up its most potent juices, bringing to blossom such flowers as Wordsworth's "Poems of Childhood," such pansies as Elia's thoughts? Lamb suggests country images; even though he was of the city, his essays have an outdoor freshness and tenderness. They take us into the open fields, and show us the soft counterchange of shadows and sunlight, bright spaces and pursuing swarths of shade. And where did he learn the longing homesickness of a child for the country? "How I would wake weeping," Elia says, "and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne, in Wiltshire!" Whether in country or city, surely it is in old lands that one gets the fullest home feeling, the complete benefits of soil, and atmosphere, and acquaintance with the various geniuses of the place. Would that we had been Londoners, we say, to know the ancient streets, or Parisians for the sake of the great libraries and of Notre Dame!
That, however, is but a melancholy _utinam_; there has been no lack of fortunate migrations among people who have been born far away from their fitting homes, and who have found their way thither in course of time. So the "rising young men" of our own colonial days returned to England to make their career; and sometimes we may trace the features of their childhood's "environment" in their developed genius. Our painters, for whom the new country was not yet a quite satisfactory place, displayed perhaps the strongest homing tendency. Copley, West, and Stuart, for instance, all American born, had to seek an older home of art. West returned in youth to England, and Copley in early manhood; there they made their careers, there they lived and died; while Stuart, after passing fifteen years in Europe, came back to settle in America. But none of these artists quite severed himself from his native country. American themes served each of them for some of his best known works: as in Stuart's famous "Washington," West's "Death of General Wolfe," and Copley's first historical picture, so called, the "Youth Rescued from a Shark."[4]
[4] Now, I believe, in the Boston Athenæum.
There, too, was Copley's son, born, like his father, in New England. In 1774 he was taken to London, where he too made his career, a distinguished one; for the Boston boy lived to become Baron Lyndhurst and Lord Chancellor. But as the eminent nobleman to be, at the time of his demigration, was but two years old, it is difficult to point out any traits of distinctively American statesmanship in his career.