Nephi’s father, Helaman, had exhorted him to remember his heritage, and gave him a name (and his brother as well) that would help them to remember their heritage. This lesson was well learned. When Nephi begins his lament, he begins by tying his desires to the ancestors. He desires to have been with his namesake Nephi in the better times when the people followed the laws of God.
Of course Nephi is using the typical human embellishing of the past, making it better than it was. Nephi does not long for the original familiar tension when the Lamanites forced the first Nephites to flee. He is not speaking of the difficulties that Jacob had in teaching the people, and dealing with the issue of multiple wives. He wishes for an idealized past were all was better, where the great Nephi was in charge, and all sat willingly at his feet.
This tells us that Nephi was as human as the rest of us, and that while he certainly had read much of the records of the past, he probably did with them what we tend to do with the scriptures – that is, read the “good parts” and skip quickly over the parts that are of less interest. For Nephi, the record of the past held some idyllic version of a people sitting willingly at the feet of the great first prophet.
Textual: Mormon is inserting this lament from Nephi’s writings. The lament consists of verses 7-9, and must be considered to be copies of the text directly from Nephi’s record, without any editorial comment from Mormon. Mormon returns to editorializing in verse 10.