326 THE COLOURINGS OF LANDSCAPES. 



have no doubt that much of that love of country, 

 which is so strongly marked a characteristic among 

 all sections of the human family, and the existence of 

 that national spirit of patriotism which preserves the 

 autonomy of states, is largely due to an unconscious 

 predilection for certain types of form and colour, pre- 

 valent in our native land, with which our earliest re- 

 collections have been associated. Thus the Scotchman 

 longs for the purple tints of his heather-clad hills; 

 the Swiss and the Norwegian for their pine-covered 

 mountain slopes; even the Esquimaux loves his snowy 

 wastes and the frozen glory of the arctic night. Many 

 might suppose that the love of family, or of friends, 

 is the chief attraction: but our colonials often take 

 their families with them, or marry and form a family 

 in the colony; in either case the family tie would 

 thus seem to bind them closer to the colony than to 

 the Fatherland, where after a lapse of years a man 

 becomes forgotten, the friends of his youth being 

 mostly scattered or dead. Yet, however long his 

 absence, every British colonist longs, if he can, at 

 least to revisit the land of his birth. It is the country 

 therefore, which changes not, rather than the people, 

 who do change, that is the true magnet that attracts. 

 We have, moreover, been, on several occasions, profoundly 

 struck by observing the affection felt towards the old 

 country (the " Mother of Nations, " as they call her) by 

 colonials born and brought up in the colonies, who 

 have arrived, it may be, at old age, before being able 

 to visit the Mother land ; yet we have seen such persons, 

 when landing upon her shores, quite as visibly moved 

 as any of those who as young men and women quitted 

 the homes of their childhood in search of fortune. 



