The tent was pitched on the high bank over the lake, with the door toward Mount Hermon, upon which the dying day played wondrous symphonies to the eye. There was no sail or boat upon the lake, and we strolled into the town.

It was at Tiberias that Eothen attended the congress of Fleas, and the filth and squalor of this Chapel of Ease to the holy city of Saffet, in the mountains, do not belie their fame. The town is thronged with Flemish Jews who await here the coming of the Messiah, who will reign at neighboring Saffet, before going to Jerusalem. The men, clad in every variety of sordid rags, with long elfish earlocks, a wan and puny aspect, and a kind of drivelling leer and cunning in the eye, were a singular combination of Boz's Fagin, and Carlyle's Apes of the Dead Sea. Never, surely, was so bewitched and strange a population. They had the sallow chalkiness of complexion peculiar to German tailors, and wore the huge bell-crowned black hat which they wear everywhere else in the world. But the women, as if to complete the confusion, were even comely, and their fair round faces, with caps, and the coarse substantiality of the German female costume, perplexed the fancy upon the sea of Galilee.

Artistic Leisurlie drew a Christian girl with her water jar, and tried to draw a Muslim boy. But he was afraid, and ran shouting away, laughingly pointing out one of his companions as a proper victim. But we started upon seeing him. Retzsch had been before us, and in his Mephistophiles has drawn only a horribly perfect likeness of that boy of Tiberias.

The morning was more merciful to the Sea of Galilee. The sun clomb out of the East over toppling clouds, while we skirted the lake, often walking our horses in the water.

The shore blazed with flowers. Had ours been the bridal train of Helen, skirting classic seas, the way could not have been more festally adorned. One Rhododendron upon the shore of Galilee, flames in my memory yet, a symbol of the tropics. The tangled luxuriance of flowers brushed against us, as if to secure in our hearts sweeter remembrances of Galilee, than that of the apes of the Dead Sea, with long ear locks, who haunt the mis erable Tiberias. These flowers are the relics of Caper naum, for so utterly has the city vanished from the earth. A few cattle grazed on the lake side, or stood contemplative in the water. Two or three Bedoueen shepherds gazed listlessly over the lake. It was a bewildering morning.

Every day, as you journey in Palestine, the natural imagery of Jesus' speech solicits your eye and touches your heart.

As you went down through flowery Zabulon to the sea, you heard him say "Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." As your eye wanders musingly over the landscape and marks the solitary towns upon the hills, especially Saffet, above you on the mountains, when you turn away from the Sea of Galilee, you recall "A city set upon an hill can not be hid.". Watching the simple and cumbrous processes of grinding grain between stones, usually done by women, you understand that 'one shall be taken, and the other left." As the camels

and asses pass laden with goat skins of wine, you understand why "no man putteth new wine into old bottles."

These things impress you with the reality of that life. If a Teacher were now walking up and down the land, and were illustrating his words by the objects that met his eyes, you would constantly hear the familiar figures of the gospels. And these unchanged aspects of landscape and life surviving through all vicissitudes of race and fortune, annihilate time, and make you the contemporary of Jesus, as in the Pestum temples you are a fellow-citizen of Pericles.

We emerged upon the upper valley of the Jordan. It is broad and beautiful, but desolate, like the rest of the country. Scattered Bedoueen camps and cattle were the only population. Luxuriant grain waved on every hand, which is harvested by the Bedoueen, who come in for that purpose from the desert. Flowers grow rankly, and the plain was so spacious and mountain-walled, that there is nothing fairer in its kind, except, perhaps, the Swiss valley of Unterwalden.

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Crossing the main stream of the Jordan upon a picturesque ruined bridge, of Roman construction, which commands a view of the whole valley, and beyond which are remains of a Roman way, the only proper road in Palestine, we began to ascend the spurs of the Gebel Shekh, or Mount Hermon, toward Panias, and so reached our last station in the Holy Land. q 2 DAVA 4

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ཁྐྲི་་ས་

PANIAS is the true point at which to take leave of Palestine, for there what is most beautiful in human history, mingles with what is most sublime. At Panias, the grace of Grecian story blends with the gravity of Christian ethics.

It is the site of that strange old legend of Plutarch, which Milton, Schiller, and Mrs. Barrett Browning, have sung. Here were the statues of Pan and his peers and nymphs, which fell and shivered, with a moan far resounding over land and sea, at the moment of Christ's nativity. It was even more than a moan, and the words, "Great Pan is dead," swept across the Mediterranean, and were heard by certain mariners.

If, as that poet of the Syrian sunshine has said, “Ever does natural beauty steal in like air and envelope great actions," it is as often true of the sites of beautiful tradition. Certainly the fountain of Egeria, by its waving tapestry of maiden-hair fern, appeals to the eye today, as the story of the nymph appeals to the imagination. Even were there no legend, your musing fancy at the fountain would instinctively create it.

So at Panias, a feeling of poetic tradition inheres in the landscape. It is not lovely and pathetic only, as the Syrian landscape generally is, except on those choice days, when Solomon in all his glory rules the flowery land. But as you turn from the great upper valley of the Jordan, and wind, ascending, among the warm, oakcovered slopes, and see at length the Italian picturesqueness which embosoms the town-then imagination demands a legend.

You find it, and it is the most striking of all.

You will well remember Panias, because you stand there as a man whose sympathy does not begin with a time or a person, but which acknowledges the same imperial truth and beauty under whatever masques.

It was the Cesarea Philippi of the New Testament. There is no record that Jesus was ever farther north, than this spot. Yet here you wonder if he did not go on, and look at Damascus, as at Nazareth you wonder if he ever went down through Zabulon to the sea. Probably not, for had he done so, it would have reappeared in the imagery of his teachings, as did the other large and simple features of what he saw.

A lofty cliff overhangs Panias, and in its face the niche is hollowed in which the statues stood.

You will figure Jesus standing before the grotto; but he will not seem to you to scorn the statues as idols— which was the weakness of Mohammad at Mecca,-but to reverence in them the holy instinct of Beauty from which all art springs. He would not have shared the very error he condemned in idolatry, namely, the confu