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CHAPTER XII.

A TRUCE.

THE faithful reader who has clung with me to MacWhirter up to this chapter, may, if he will regard the eleventh whence he has just emerged as an evening vapour rolling over the desert, and settling for awhile upon our camp.

But as it disperses, and the day breaks, and we are about to mount again, I say to him that the record of a desert journey must needs be more of sensation than of sight. With ink and types which allow no perspective, no light, and shade, and colour, only the pictures can be painted to which such means are competent. Therefore, how can the traveller most vividly figure to the reader who is not a student of some especial point, the regions of which he tells ?

Statistics hardly suffice. The golden ball of St. Peter's is four hundred and ninety-four feet

from the pavement.

But that statement, even

supported by the fact that the breadth of the façade is more than four hundred feet, does not leave St. Peter's a permanent figure in the mind. Nor does the ingenious combination with those truths of the consideration that the great nave is fretted with gold, and that the four huge piers which support the dome are faced with marble, and that the baldacchino or canopy over the high altar is of bronze, stripped by a Pope from the Pantheon, impress the mind with what it wishes to know of St. Peter's.

But the impression of all this wonderful architectural combination, and the associations which wreathe it, in a judicious and sensitive mind, with invisible ornaments of an unknown grace, if accurately reproduced by the pen, shall build St. Peter's again, and found it deep in your mind for ever.

Is it not strange, even allowing all that I have previously claimed for travellers who tell their travels, that their books are so cold and spectral?

Before and after I went to the East, I read the numberless volumes that record the many Eastern tours of learned and poetic men. But the most, either despairing of imparting the true oriental flavour to their works, thinking, perhaps, that Eastern enthusiasm must needs exhale in the

record, as the Neapolitans declare that the Lachrymæ Christi can have the genuine flavour only in the very Vesuvian vineyard where it grows, -or hugging some forlorn hope that the reader's imagination will warm the dry bones of detail into life-most of the travellers write their books as bailiffs take an inventory of attached furniture.— Item. One great pyramid, four hundred and ninety-eight feet high.-Item. One tomb in a rock, with two bushels of mummy dust.-Item. Two hundred and fifty miles over a desert.—Item. One grotto at Bethlehem, and contents,―to wit: ten golden lamps, twelve silver ditto, twenty yards of tapestry, and a marble pavement. And with this ghostly dance of death shaken before our eyes, we are invited to contemplate the gorgeous pageant of oriental life.

The reader, surely, will not suspect me of slighting the claims of exact knowledge. Scientific research embodies its results in concise and colourless pages. Its aim is to state a fact, not to impart an impression. The latter, however, is the object of a general book of travels, and the facts must yield only their juice and their aroma to the traveller, if he would share his pleasure with others. Guide-books are not absorbingly interesting, and give small idea of the countries they describe. Guide-books are

indispensable to the traveller, but they are surely not the standard of his own account of the objects, of which they give him the locality.

Look at Lewis's Egyptian pictures, even at Horace Vernet's ideally conventional paintings of Eastern life, and revelling in the luxury of their colour and form, consider what books men have written of these things. Reflect, that if Lewis and Vernet were using the means of Titian and Claude, the book-writers professed to use those of Shakspeare and Shelley. The Arabian Nights and Hafiz are more valuable for their practical communication of the spirit and splendour of oriental life, than all the books of eastern travel ever written, of which, for the general reader, Eothen is certainly the best, being brilliant, picturesque, humorous, and poetic. Yet Eothen is still a cockney-never puts off the Englishman, and is suspicious of his own enthusiasm, which, therefore, sounds a little exaggerated.

The caravan is not yet out of sight, gracious reader; we shall overtake it at a bound when we will; let MacWhirter, therefore, browse, while I hold you here a moment longer.

It confirms the tenor of our thought in this chapter that the most satisfactory impressions of places we have never seen are derived from poetry.

I would also say, in some cases, from music; for I know no song, no book, no picture, so utterly and exquisitely Venetian as the Gondola-Lied of Mendelssohn. If the listener truly hear that, he knows what Venice truly is.

In Rome you find yourself repeating Byron and Goethe's hexameters, then, when you most feel Rome; and in Venice it is Byron again, and the unmetred poetry of Beckford, whose lines recur. It is not, I believe, so much because they treat of the objects you are seeing, as because they seem to you the natural, the poetic, and therefore most profound, suggestions of the character of the place. And in the same way, as you advance through the Syrian summer, the fragrant and voluptuous imagery of Solomon's Song is the most felicitous expression of your experience there.

The reason of this is, surely, that the permanent interest of various lands is intellectual. We like them for what they are to us, rather than for what they are in themselves. Yet we cannot know what they are, nor assimilate them to our own advantage, unless we are steeped in their spirit. We must be Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Roman, or we shall never know what Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Rome mean.

Hence arises the abiding charm of books of

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