Even those people whom you might think the most unlikely persons to have such thoughts, will have these reflections, so why not speak of them?
Some, I know, believe that all religious conversation should be strictly tabooed in any reference to secular matters.

But it seems to me a very delicate faith that will only stand an airing once a week, like your church services on Sundays! _I_ have thought of such things, and I'm not ashamed to mention them.
Acting on my mind at the same time--in concert with these religious doubts, and the consciousness of my unlucky fortunes--was a strong feeling of home-sickness, which grew and grew with greater intensity as the months rolled by.
I got so miserable, that, I felt with Shelley-- "I could lie down, like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear!" For what profit did this warring against destiny bring me?
Nothing-- nothing, but the "vanity and vexation of spirit," which a more believing soul than mine had apostrophised in agony, ages before I was born.
You may not credit the fact of the Swiss mountaineers pining of what is called "Home-woe," when banished from their beloved glaciers, the same as Cyrus's legions suffered from _nostalgia_; and, may put down the Frenchman's _maladie du pays_, which some expatriated communists are probably experiencing now in New Caledonia, to blatant sentimentality; but they are each and all true expositions of feeling.
We Englishmen are generally prosaic; but some of us have known the terrible yearning which this home-sickness produces in us in foreign lands.

The Devonshire shepherd will weep over the recollections which a little daisy will bring back to him of the old country of his childhood, when standing beneath an Australian gum tree.

I have seen a Scotchman in America cherish a thistle, as if it were the rarest of plants, from its native associations; and I know of a potted shamrock which was brought all the way across the ocean in an emigrant ship, by an Irish miner, and which now adorns the window of a veranda-fronted cottage at the Pittsburgh mines in Pennsylvania! Some of us _are_ "sentimental," you see.

I can answer for myself, at least; and I know that the air of "Home, sweet Home," has affected me quite as much as the "Ranz des Vaches" would appeal to the sensibilities of an Alpine Jodeller! I got home-sick now.