Departure from Egypt.—A Poet in Palestine.—Difference in Travellers.—Mr. Taylor’s Appreciation.—First View of Tyre.—Route to Jerusalem.—The Holy City.—Bath in the Dead Sea.—Appearance of Jerusalem.—Samaria.—Looking down upon Damascus.—Life in the eldest City.—The Bath.—Dose of Hashish.—Being a Turk among Turks. “The Poet came to the Land of the East,
When Spring was in the air:
The earth was dressed for a wedding feast,
So young she seemed, and fair;
And the poet knew the Land of the East—
His soul was native there.
All things to him were the visible forms
Of early and precious dreams,—
Familiar visions that mocked his quest
Beside the Western streams,
Or gleamed in the gold of the clouds, unrolled
In the sunset’s dying beams.”
—Taylor, 1852.
If there is any land where every grain of sand and every blade of grass is pervaded by thrilling associations, that land is Palestine. Especially and peculiarly animated are its hills and vales to a poet such as Taylor proved to be. It may be that some superficial and matter-of-fact people who have visited the Holy Land in the hot season, have not felt the charm of[183] its sacredness, owing to heat, barrenness, vermin, and beggars. There may be a small class of iconoclastic jokers, who, caring not how holy or tender the theme, never fail to use it for ridicule, if it suits their humoristic purpose. But the large class of travellers who visit Jerusalem and the country round about, feel the inspiring presence of the Past, and enjoy in an indescribable fullness the associations connected with it. In a higher and nobler degree, the mind imbued with poetic images, a ready imagination, and a keen discernment of beauty in landscape or history, will avail itself of the great opportunities for pleasure and profit which such a land supplies. In this sense Mr. Taylor enjoyed a great advantage. He made his physical being so subordinate to his mental, that no fatigue, no hunger, no thirst, no annoyance from beggars, nor fears of robbers, could interfere with the appreciation of the beautiful. How greatly he enjoyed his visit to Palestine, none but intimate friends ever knew. In his letters, he often gave way to enthusiastic expressions, and in his book, often gave very vivid descriptions of what had been, as well as that which then existed. But a fear of exaggeration through praise, and a modest misgiving lest his poetical fancy should not suit his readers, led him to write in a more prosy vein than he talked. In conversation with friends in Germany and America, and often in his lectures, after he had finished his tours, he graphically pictured the impressive events of the past connected[184] with Palestine, which seemed to pass like a panorama before him. To him, such a land would be full of interest, whether he trod its fields at a time of the year when it was luxuriant, or at a season when the sun and simoon have made it a desert. To lie upon its burning sands and dream of the sweltering hosts that fought around the spot; to bask in the cool shades of its olives and cedars, and think of Gethsemane and the sweets of Sharon; to stand on the summit of the Mount of Olives, Carmel, or Hermon, and realize the almost overwhelming fact that before him were the plains, hills, valleys, conquered and reconquered since man was made, and which were peopled by the great, the good, the wild, and the bloodthirsty of every age; to recognize the localities where dwelt or fought the heroes of Holy Writ; to feel the presence of the King of kings as “on mysterious wings” he swept the plain and shielded his people; to walk on the very path whereon the Son of God had often placed his feet; to dream in the starlight of Apostles, priests, Romans, Crusaders, and Saracens, was an experience especially gratifying to him, and interesting to a greater or less degree to all travellers. The writer recalls, perhaps in an imperfect form, a verse which Mr. Taylor wrote during his stay in Palestine, and which came to the writer with singular force while carelessly wandering along the valley between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.
[185]
“Thy strength, Jerusalem, is o’er,
And broken are thy walls;
The harp of Israel sounds no more
In thy deserted halls:
But where thy Kings and Prophets trod,
Triumphant over death,
Behold the living soul of God,—
The Christ of Nazareth!
The halo of his presence fills
Thy courts, thy ways of men;
His footsteps on thy holy hills
Are beautiful as then;
The prayer, whose bloody sweat betrayed
His human agony,
Still haunts the awful olive-shade
Of old Gethsemane.”
To him the past was real. He saw the fields of corn, the ancient olive-trees, the high walls, and the high towers, upon which the Saviour looked. He saw again Abraham, Samuel, Saul, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Pilate, and their associates. He walked in imagination in the welcoming crowd as they strewed the branches along the path from Bethany to Jerusalem. He saw the council chamber, the cross, and the ascension. He dreamed of the gathering armies at Antioch and Joppa, whose banners at last waved over the palace of Godfrey of Bouillon in Jerusalem. To him the gates of history swung wide open, and he wandered back through the centuries, meeting patriarch and maiden, shepherd and warrior, prophet and judge, seer and apostle, in a companionship social and confidential. It was like long generations of experience[186] to walk those hallowed fields and realize the wonderful tales of history. In this, as much as in the views of the present, is found the profit resulting from travel in such lands. One lives over the tales of which he has read, with each locality serving as a fresh reminder of the unnoted details. He is an old man in experience who has travelled in the right spirit over those eldest lands of the world; and few indeed is the number of tourists who can feel that they have done so.
Mr. Taylor, like Longfellow, Tennyson, and Scott, had a gift of looking through the present into the past, and held delightful communion with the old days. Trying, however, with a laudable desire to instruct his readers, he kept studiously close to the simple facts of his actual experience, and in his narrative seldom allowed himself to fall into poetical expressions.
He left Egypt about the middle of the month of April and landed at Beyrout, which was not at that time, nor since, a very attractive locality. It was made more unpleasant to him by an incarceration in a kind of prison called the “Quarantine.” But with a resignation worthy of the oldest Turk, he made the best of his circumstances, and judging by the account he has given of it, he had an easy, jolly time of it. Released from the prison he travelled down the shore of the Mediterranean to Tyre, with whose remnant he seems to have been deeply impressed. The old Tyre, with its fleets, with its enormous stocks of merchandise,[187] with its lofty piles of cedar timber, with its gorgeous purple robes, with its bulwarks and battlements, with its armed defenders and hosts of besiegers, arose from its crumbled fragments and passed through the panoramic changes which so startle the student of Syrian history.
After leaving the village which now replaces the ancient city, he rode down the sandy shore and composed a poem which was afterwards somewhat changed, but in which was retained the boldness of the waves, which then beat at his feet.
“The wild and windy morning is lit with lurid fire;
The thundering surf of ocean beats on the rocks of Tyre,—
Beats on the fallen columns and round the headland roars,
And hurls its foamy volume along the hollow shores,
And calls with angry clamor, that speaks its long desire:
‘Where are the ships of Tarshish, the mighty ships of Tyre?’
Within her cunning harbor, choked with invading sand,
No galleys bring their freightage, the spoils of every land,
And like a prostrate forest, when autumn gales have blown,
Her colonnades of granite lie shattered and o’erthrown;
And from the reef the pharos no longer flings its fire,
To beacon home from Tarshish, the lordly ships of Tyre.”
“Where is the wealth of ages that heaped thy princely mart?
The pomp of purple trappings; the gems of Syrian art;
The silken goats of Kedar; Sab?a’s spicy store;
The tributes of the islands thy squadrons homeward bore,
When in thy gates triumphant they entered from the sea
With sound of horn and sackbut, of harp and psaltery.”
“Though silent and forgotten, yet Nature still laments
The pomp and power............