Washington Irving Comes Home

from Washington Irving’s A Tour of the Prairies:

At length the long anticipated moment arrived.  I again  saw the “blue line of my native land” rising like a cloud in that horizon where, so many years before, I had seen it fade away.  I again saw the bright city of my birth rising out of its beautiful bay; its multiplied fanes and spires, and its prolonged forest of masts proclaiming its augmented grandeur.  My heart throbbed with pride and admiration as I gazed upon it, I gloried in being its son.

But how was the wanderer to be received, after such an absence ?  Was he to be taken, as a favored child, to its bosom;  or repulsed as a stranger, and a changeling?

My old doubts recurred as I stepped upon land. I could  scarcely realize that I was indeed in my native city, among the haunts of my childhood.  Might not this be another of those dreams that had so often beguiled me?  There were circumstances enough to warrant such a surmise.  I passed through places that ought to be familiar to me, but all were changed.  Huge edifices and lofty piles had sprung up in the  place of lowly tenements; the old landmarks of the city were  gone; the very streets were altered.

As I passed on, I looked wistfully in every face : not one  was known to me, not one!  Yet I was in haunts where every  visage was once familiar to me.  I read the names over the doors :  all were new.  They were unassociated with any early recollection. The saddening conviction stole over my heart that I was a  stranger in my own home!  Alas!  thought I, what had I to expect after such an absence!

Let not the reader be mistaken.  I have no doleful picture  to draw; no sorrowful demand to make upon his sympathies.  It  has been the lot of many a wanderer, returning after a shorter  lapse of years, to find the scenes of his youth gone to ruin and  decay.   If I had any thing to deplore, it was the improvement of  my home.  It had outgrown my recollection from its very prosperity, and strangers had crowded into it from every clime, to participate in its overflowing abundance.  A little while was sufficient to reconcile me to a change, the result of prosperity.  My friends, too, once clustered in neighboring contiguity, in a moderate community, now scattered widely asunder, over a splendid metropolis, soon gathered together to welcome me; and never did wanderer, after such an absence, experience such a greeting.  Then it was that every doubt vanished from my mind.  Then it  was that I felt I was indeed at home, and that it was a home of  the heart! I thanked my stars that I had been born among such  friends; I thanked my stars, that had conducted me back to  dwell among them while I had yet the capacity to enjoy their fellowship.