then this answer fills the night like a majestic

wind

"The lonely mountains o'er

And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament,
From haunted spring and dale

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent.
With flower-inwoven tresses torn,

The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

In consecrated earth,

And on the holy hearth,

The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;

In urns and altars round,

A drear and dying sound

Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint,
And the chill marble seems to sweat

While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.

Peör and Baälim

Forsake their temples dim,

With that twice-battered God of Palestine,

And mooned Astaroth,

Heaven's Queen and mother both,

Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine:

The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn,

In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.”

DAMASCUS.

"Es Sham, Shereef: the beautiful, the blessed."

"Ah! if but mine had been the Painter's hand

To express what then I saw, and add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,

The consecration and the poet's dream."

WORDSWORTH.

"Air rather gardenny I should say."-MELVILLE'S Moby-Dick.

"Nor shall the garden during his pleasant distraction be termed otherwise than Paradise, with whose flower he stuffs his bosom and decketh his turbant, shaking his head at their sweet savor."-ROBERT WIthers, 1650. Grand Signor's Seraglio.

"O just Fakir, with brow austere,

Forbid me not the vine,

On the first day poor Hafiz clay

Was kneaded up with wine."

HAFIZ. Emerson's Translation.

CHAPTER I.

THE EYE OF THE EAST.

OUT of the South blew the halcyon day. The sky was like a precious stone. Opals and turquoises are the earth's efforts to remember that glowing sky and a day so fair.

We wound joyfully along under the snowy brow of Hermon. The path climbed northward over wide, bare hills, and the sound of running water filled the air. Presently we had crossed the summit of the ridge between the valley of the Jordan and the plain of Damascus. The streams ran no longer southward, but flowed with us. Our eyes were fixed upon the north, our hearts upon Damascus.

The summit of each hill anxiously gained, constantly disappointed us by revealing another. Conversation flagged and died away. Each rode on alone. A Turk passed by with a pompous retinue, and in the beauty of one of his train, which not even the jealous fulness of a huge black silk

balloon could utterly conceal, Damascus came out to meet us, as Venice comes to you in the first gondola.

There was nothing in the broad, desolate landscape to attract the eye or engage the mind. The interest of the morning was absorbed in one desire, painful from its intensity, the desire of beholding Damascus.

The last summit was reached. A vast plain stretched northward between azure lines of mountain, and a dim band across the plains united them. It was the foliage that embowers Damascus. Little dark spots were scattered on the else treeless plain. They were groves, far beyond the city. They lay like islands in the wilderness, but like a continent of green reposed Damascus upon the waste.

As we approached, the vastness became beauty and the vagueness form. Arcadia and Boccaccio's garden faded in the enchantment of that vision. Clustering minarets and spires, as of frosted flame, glittered in the morning above the ambrosial darkness of endless groves and gardens. There were no details, only the thronging richness of infinite suggestion. It was the metropolis of Romance, and the well-assured capital of Oriental hope. Drawing aside distance like a veil, it challenged worship as it revealed its beauty. The glowing imagery of its description in Eastern poetry paled