CHAPTER VIII.

BETHLEHEM.

THE scenery of the Gospel story is vague until you are in Palestine. Literature and Art, forgetting climate and costume, set the events of that history in the landscape and atmosphere they know. All the religious pictures lack local truth. The temple in Raphael's Spozalizio, is of the Roman architecture of his day. Paul Veronese's Suppers and Marriage Feasts are gorgeous chapters of Venetian life, and this, which is fair enough in Italian pictures, of which the essential character was so striking and beautiful-reaches the extremest absurdity in the Dutch sacred pictures, especially Teniers' St. Peter in Prison. It is fair enough, viewed by strict art, yet it is a loss to the pictures, for this golden air and picturesque costume, and lovely landscape, would have singularly deepened their effect.

So we said as we rode over the bare hills to Bethlehem, and paused at the well of which David longed to drink, but poured out the water unto the Lord.

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Scant patches of grain and banks of wild flowers waved gaily to us as we mounted again, wondering if haply, from this spot the wise men saw the star. The distant hillsides were the fields of Boaz. The artistic of Leisurlie was struck with the sweeps of the mountain lines, whose sides uniting at the base, allowed no proper valleys, but only a narrow watercourse. The landscape was bare and sere with the melancholy olive, and, above a grove of figs and olives rose, upon a hill-top, the grey walls of Bethlehem.

"How beautiful," said Leisurlie, "would be this landscape in a picture of Ruth. How just in a religious picture, of which the chief interest is a woman, this olive mountain-side crowned with grey Bethlehem, in which a woman gave the world its best gift."

He too, we mused, as our eyes wandered over the lands of Boaz, but a gleaner in the fields of Time,— yet whose harvests heap the future like a granary.

Our way rolled through the billowy land, and we reached at length, stern little Bethlehem, sitting, like a fortress, upon the mountain.

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A large church is its chief feature, and as you stand in its cold vastness, you would be in Italy, except for the swarthy faces, whose mysterious eyes follow your movements with grave curiosity. It is nothing but a large cold church, garrisoned by a few friars, and seems discordant with that spot where nothing cold or bare should be. With very mingled emotions you descend toward the grotto, directly under the church, which makes Bethlehem famous.

Winding with tapers down narrow steps, you emerge in the irregular excavations among the rock, and behold what they call the cell of St. Jerome.-— But you do not linger. The Franciscan precedes you to the Grotto of the Nativity, and there can be no reasonable doubt of its identity.

He opens the door. A gleam of soft light, and a warm odour of incense stream outward. In that moment there is no more Franciscan, nor Italian church, nor taper. Your knees bend beneath you, and your eyes close.

They open upon the Grotto, gorgeous with silver and golden lamps, with vases and heavy tapestries, with marbles and ivories-dim with the smoke of incense, and thick with its breath. In the hush of sudden splendour it is the secret cave of Ala-ed-deen, and you have rubbed the precious lamp.

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Then your sense is seized in the voluptuous embrace of the odours,-of the brilliant flames, motionless in the warm air,-of the sheen of tapestry, and the flexile richness of the monks' robes at the altar, and your dazzled sense reels, an intoxicated Roman, through this Bethlehem grotto, which the luxurious Hadrian, after Rome had conquered Jerusalem, consecrated to Adonis.

But you see that it is low and irregular, that the ceiling and walls are rock-that it is only a rough place of refuge, if you strip away gold and tapestry. You see human figures stretched motionless upon the ground, kissing a small circle of jasper with silver rays, the shrine of all Christendom. The figures do not rise. They lie for long, long minutes speechless,―tears streaming from their eyes, and a sob vibrating at intervals through the Grotto. As you gaze, the vision of the Bethlehem landscape returns to you—lonely, solemn, bare. The warm sweet air in which you stand is filled with strange music,

And its measures, like the waving of palms in the moonlight, breathe through your heart, "on earth peace, good will to men."

These are your mingled emotions in the Grotto

of Bethlehem. Romance and Religion blend there more closely than at any other spot in the Holy Land.

Climbing again into daylight, you look from the lofty windows of the refectory of the convent, down upon the field of the shepherds. It is a steep mountain-side, dotted with olives.

It is not glad

and gracious, as if that music, like heavenly dew,

kept it fresh for ever.

the day at Bethlehem.

Sad are the landscape and

The glory of the sunset strikes across the mountains as you return. Silent and pensive, your talk is no more of pictures. You ride along the "fulle fayre waye, be pleynes and wodes fulle delectable,” as good Sir John Mandeville found the road to Bethlehem. And if a solitary rose redden the sunset in the fields, you remember his story of the maid who was martyred here, and as the fire began, she prayed, and the burning brands became red rose-trees, and the unburnt, white rose-trees, full, both of blossoms and the first roses that ever bloomed.