The Wildfire Club - The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive

OR TORY LEA. VES FROM: LIFE HISTORY. 161
CHAPTER III.
"GA.BRIELLE, can you remember your home? Ah no!
I recollect - you have told me you never knew a childhood's
home. Then, sweet one, you have never known
what first love is. The spot of ground associated with
your youth's earliest memories is the mistress of your
heart. You may love again. Other scenes and other
things - friend, lover, child - these may engross manhood's
strong devotion; but the love of childhood's home
is more nearly the love of self than any later feeling.
Such was mine. There, where the first dawnings of consciousness
were awakened, I either drew thought out of
the surroundings, or else I so imprinted thought with
them that the scene - eaeh crag, and glen, flower, and
brooklet - became a part of my very self. My home,
too, was worthy of my devotion - so wild, lonely, yet
grandly beautiful. Every shape of loveliness which Nature
delights to fashion in other lands seemed here patterned
out as if to heap up models for all her fantastic moods.
Somehow the hills seemed grander there; the vast amphitheatre
which their large black summits formed, loomed
more majestic than in other places; the deep rayines and
rushing torrents, all were lighted up with deeper sunlit
gold; and never moonbeam fell on lake of more placid
beauty, deeper blue, or fringed with grander woods, than
this dear home, so well remembered, showed. One spot,
more dear than all, was the rocky, outstretched arm of
one vast giant mountain. No foot less sure than my firm
boyish tread could have carried out the human form on
Buch a dizzy ledge; yet when I had gained the edge, what
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