Peacefully, no doubt, strolling with his father among the melancholy hills of Galilee, looking down into the lake-like vastness of Esdraëlon, where the great captains of his nation had fought, hearing the wild winds blow from the sea, watching the stars, and remembering the three days of his childhood, when he sat in the temple at Jerusalem.

CHAPTER XVII.

SUMMER.

"Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness with pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense?"

In late April, in the vale of Zabulon, riding from pensive Nazareth in the mountains, to heroic Acre upon the sea, the triumphant pomp of the Syrian summer bursts upon you.

You cannot see the advent of that beauty upon a plain, or in a forest, or upon a hill, or along the sea-shore, alone. It is the combination of all which reveals it. Flowers set, like stars, against the solemn night of foliage; the broad plain flashing with green and gold, state-livery of the royal year; the long grasses languidly overleaning winding water-courses, indicated only by a more luxuriant line of richness; the blooming surfaces of nearer hills, and the distant blue mistiness of mountains, walls, and bulwarks of the year's garden, melting in the haze, sculptured in the moonlight, firm as relics of a

fore-world in the celestial amber of clear afternoons;—it is only in this combination of variety, through which, on a brilliant day, you pass over the vale of Zabulon, that you recognise the splendour of Syria.

But not the flute sweetness of lawns and meadow lands alone; not the sombre bass of dark forests not the stringed unison of gently waving hills, nor the keen tone of a mountain-outlined horizon can alone satisfy the imperial love of beauty-only the rhythmical assent of all completes the symphony of the Syrian year.

A bland presence it advances from the Caspian, perfumed with the rose-secrets of Cashmere, with the breath of lands watered by the Tigris, and of the gardens of the Euphrates. Following the sun with beauty, it smooths the land into grace, bloom, and summer. Touching the snows of Lebanon, they become beautiful feet upon the mountains, running with glad tidings to the sea, and the year follows them, pausing upon the shore, and breathing balm far over the water.

In the vale of Zabulon, quickened by the fulness and ripeness of the unwithering warmth, penetrated with a sense of delight in the year, which not even Italy imparts, I recalled the words said to me in passing years before, by a poet in New England, "What Syrian sunshine!"

It was the most delicate of June mornings, one of those rare days with us, in which the sky, charged with rosy light, seems but an evanescent bloom upon the air, and as we met upon a village common, over breathed by blossoming apple orchards, that the poet said, "What Syrian sunshine!"

The words haunted me. They expressed what I had vaguely felt of the summer. With the poet they were metaphor. With me they became a feeling. It ripened into desire. The East lay in my imagination, a formless glow, like a distant oleander bush in flower. I came to the garden, to the oleander, to the East. The glow was a burning beauty all around me. I plunged spurs into my horse and galloped through the flowers, shouting, as if the poet in the cool New England village could hear me—"What Syrian sunshine!"

If you doubt, read Solomon's Song. That whole book is a summer lyric of Syria. The very sensuousness of the imagery reveals the voluptuousness of the impression. Yet how large, how rich, how suggestive! How it is for ever the first of Love songs! To-day Solomon might lie upon a side of Zabulon, and wooing the landscape sing that song anew. For strange as it

sunny

appears of that most passionate of poems, it is Wordsworthian in its intense reality. The glow. that permeates it

is the inexpressible inspiration of the Syrian

summer.

Advancing through the festal land, gladly wreathing the pensive image of Nazareth with these abounding flowers, you repeat that song as the only justice to your eye and heart. And you peal it a cheerful battle-cry against all the doubters -baring your brow to the summer as it deepens around you, and singing to it as Solomon sang to his Beloved-" Behold thou art fair, my Love : behold thou art fair."