He suffered a sharp recoil from the solicitation of the future, an immense tenderness towards the past .-- A tenderness for those same years of tutelage and all they had brought him, not only in over-flowing animal spirits, happy intercourse and intellectual attainment; but in their limitation of private action, their security of obligation, of obedience to authority, which at the time had seemed irksome enough and upon release from which he had so recently congratulated himself.
Love of home, of England, of his own people--of the Archdeacon, in even his most full-voiced and moralizing mood--love of things tested, accustomed and friendly, touched him to the quick.

Suddenly he asked himself to what end was he leaving all these and going forth to encounter untried conditions, an unknown Nature, a moral and social order equally unknown?
Looking at the peaceful, ethereally lovely landscape, set in such close proximity and notable contrast to the unrest of that historic highway of the nations, the Channel sea, he felt small and lonely, childishly diffident and weak.

All the established safety and comfort of home, all the thoughtless irresponsible delights of vanished boyhood, pulled at his heart-strings.

He wanted, wanted wildly, desperately, not to go forward but to go back.
Mind and body being healthy, however, the phase was a passing one, and his emotion, though sincere and poignant, of brief duration.

For young blood--happily for the human story, which otherwise would read altogether too sad--defies forebodings, gaily embraces risks; and, true soldier of fortune, marches out to meet whatever fate the battlefield of manhood may hold for it, a song in its mouth and a rose behind its ear.
Tom Verity speedily came to a steadier mind, pouring honest contempt upon his momentary lapse from self-confidence.