ommon tasks as trivial; they forgot their own childhood in this
phantom-Christ who seemed to call them away. The trees and roofs of
home!--what were they to the spires and palms of that Jerusalem? And they
looked upon the old people as foolish utterly. To the parents, truly this
loss of love between them and those they had nourished was very
dreadful--this Heaven, that would alienate and draw away their offspring
into it, yet had no reference to their own hopes and wishes! In our times,
the wise father knows how better to deal with such inexperienced dreams,
which indeed are now rather more apt to represent this living world too
brightly than to scorn it for spiritual objects; he suffers the boy to
take time and find out the reality. But in those days heaven and earth
were confounded; they knew not with what words or means to disprove these
fancies; there was no world of books wherein the young soul might spend
its superfluous thought and distinguish facts from ideas. Thus had they
recourse only to outward watchfulness; to locking doors, and separating
the children from their companions, whereby the more proud and wilful were
but more confirmed. They waited for escape, and got away even by making
holes in the walls; issuing forth from home as to a festival procession,
which, swelling by degrees to many thousands, was heard passing by the
villages, and on toward the East. The eldest was not more than eighteen,
while numbers there were of far tenderer years, who, singing as they went,
travelled under guidance only of the sky, as each morning it lightened up
with radiance, and marked some especial valley or mountain-path as the
last verge of a golden Orient. From towns or castles they held apart,
sustained merely by the fruits of the earth, or by the gifts of solitary
peasants, who rejoiced to offer food to the holy pilgrimage, while at the
same time they carefully shut in their own children until it was long out
of sight. But as the country grew around them more waste and desert, as
they traversed wide, lonely, and barren plains, deep forests, or toilsome
hills, the case became different. Some, scattered from the rest, lost
their way; others, from weariness and hunger alone, dropped down and
died--boys and girls, who in that hour only remembered the bitterness of
their mothers' hearts for their loss. Still the main body continued to
press forward, encouraged by some bolder spirits amongst them, or by the
steadfast, confiding