Laudator Temporis Acti

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), The Four Men: A Farrago (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1912), p. 5:

Then I said to myself again:

"What you are doing is not worth while, and nothing is worth while on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man's desire. Consider how many years it is since you saw your home, and for how short a time, perhaps, its perfection will remain. Get up and go back to your own place if only for one day; for you have this great chance that you are already upon the soil of your own county, and that Kent is a mile or two behind."

As I said these things to myself I felt as that man felt of whom everybody has read in Homer with an answering heart: that "he longed as he journeyed to see once more the smoke going up from his own land, and after that to die."

Homer, Odyssey 1.57-59 (tr. Peter Green):

                                          Yet Odysseus, in his yearning
to perceive were it only the smoke rising up into the sky
from his homeland, longs now for death.

                                               αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεύς,
ἱέμενος καὶ καπνὸν ἀποθρῴσκοντα νοῆσαι
ἧς γαίης, θανέειν ἱμείρεται.