with black gloves, slit in the middle finger that he might turn the leaves,—the reading of the Bible in a cheerful, sing-song tone, to which its choicest sentences always sing themselves now, the setting the tune with nasal psalmody and the growling bass-viol, as if a hidden artist were playing upon a lazy lion,-the long sermon, of which I faithfully remembered the text and forgot the drift, and in which the names of Galilee, and Mary, and Nazareth were sweet sounds only, filling my mind with vague imagery, whose outline has long since faded,—the flowers and the sunny hay-fields breathing sweetly in at the open window, and all the sweeter when the Pastor read, “Yet I say unto you, Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these,"-the people in the pews, all whose faces have vanished now, save hers, so many years my elder, yet still radiant with youth, queenly in beauty and in bearing, who came, when all were seated, following the old grandfather with powdered hair and gold-headed cane, and who sat serene during the service, while I, an eight years' child, felt a vague sadness overshadow the sweet day, and quite forgot the sermon.

This was the music of the convent bell of Nazareth. In that calm Syrian afternoon, Memory, a pensive Ruth, went gleaning the silent fields of childhood, and found the scattered grain still golden, the morning sunlight yet fresh and fair.

Troops of girls passed us as we came to the town. Their arms and hands were touched with kohl, they wore strings of pewter coins for necklaces, and their heads were girt with brilliant handkerchiefs. They did not

veil their faces, and at times from out the throng, great eyes rose bewilderingly upon our gaze. I saw many an eye in the Nazareth girls, whose light would have illuminated an artist's fame forever, could he have fixed it within the pictured face of his Madonna.

The traditions which cluster around Nazareth are so tender and domestic, that you will willingly believe, or at least you will listen to the improbable stories of the friars, as a father to the enthusiastic exaggerations of his child. With Jerusalem and its vicinity, the gravity of the doctrine is too intimately associated to allow the mind to heed the quarrels and theories about the localities. It is the grandeur of the thought which commands you.

But in Nazareth, it is the personality of the Teacher which interests you. All the tenderness of the story centres here. The youth of the Madonna and the unrecorded years of the child, belong to Nazareth. Therefore imagination unbends to the sweet associations of domestic life. The little picture in the Uffizi recurs again, and the delicate sketches of Overbeck, illustrating the life of Christ, in which, as a blooming boy in his father's shop, he saws a bit of wood into the form of a cross, looking up smilingly to the thoughtful Joseph and the yearning Mary, as when he brings her the passion-flower in the pleasant room.

The tranquil afternoon streams up the valley, and your heart is softened as if by that tender smile of Mary; and yielding to the soliciting friars, you go quietly and see where Joseph's house stood, and where the Angel Gabriel saluted Mary, and the chimney of the hearth

upon which she warmed food for her young child and baked cakes for Joseph when he came home from work, and the rock whence the Jews wished to cast Jesus, and another rock upon which he eat with his disciples.

You listen quietly to these stories, and look at the sights. The childish effort to give plausible form to the necessary facts of the history of the place, is too natural to offend. When the pretence is too transparent, you smile, but do not scold. For, whether he lived upon this side of the way or upon that, this is the landscape he saw for thirty years. A quiet workman, doubtless, with his father, strolling 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.

Walking in the dying day over the same solitary hills, you will see in the sunset but one figure moving along the horizon—a grave, manly form, outlined upon the West.

Here was the true struggle of his life-the resolve to devote himself to the work. These are the exceeding high mountains upon which he was lifted in temptation; here in the fulness of his youth and hope, Satan walked with him, seductive. For every sin smiles in the first address, says Jeremy Taylor, and carries light in the face and honey in the lip. Green and flowery as Esdraëlon, lay the valleys of ease and reputation at his feet; but sternly precipitous, as the heights of Galilee, the cliffs of Duty above him buried their heads in heaven.

Here, too, was he transfigured; and in the light of Thought he floats between Moses and Elias, between Faith and Duty, and the splendor of his devotion so overflows history with glory, that men call him God.

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 foreworld in the celestial amber of clear afternoons,-it is only in this combination of variety, through which, on