a brilliant day, you pass over the vale of Zabulon, that you recognize the splendor 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, overbreathed 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 "What Syrian sunshine."

me

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 forever the first of Love-songs! To-day Solomon might lie upon a sunny side of Zabulon, and wooing the landscape sing that song anew. For strange as it 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."

XVIII.

Arre.

WE came to Acre, a little, dull, ruined old town on the very edge of the sea, which dashed against it in foaming breakers, that day.

It has been battered in all kinds of wars. In 1281 the Saracens thundered at its gates with sixty thousand cavalry, and a hundred and sixty thousand infantry. Richard Coeur de Lion reduced it. Ibrahim Pacha carried it by assault, and in 1840 it was destroyed by the explosion of its own magazine while the British fleet lay before it, bombarding. It has been taken many times, -although Napoleon could not take it,-and looks no longer worth the taking. The sea dashes upon it as upon an old hulk which it would gladly utterly destroy.

But still in Acre is an exquisite mosque, the mosque of Sultan Djezzar, a mosaic of fine marbles rising from cypresses and palms. Its dome is ruined by much bombarding; but a fountained kiosk upon a pavement shadowed by palms, and the airy arcade which surrounds the inclosure, like the gallery of a cloister, except that this breathes of pleasure and not of meditation-give Memory still a nucleus in Acre.

As we stroll about the ruined fortifications in the still noon, and look across the water to the misty headland which, braving the sea at the farther extremity of the crescent beach, nine miles away-Golden Sleeve tells us is Mount Carmel, we listen to the tradition which quaint Henry Maundrell tells of the convent of Acre.

When, after that turbulent thundering at the gates, the Saracens entered the city, the lady abbess of the nunnery fearing for herself and nuns the fate of Houris, summoned them together as the enemy approached, and exhorted them to cut and mangle their faces, thus to quench in their own blood, the lust of the conquerors. As she spoke she set them the example, and all the nuns inspired by her lofty courage, did likewise. And while they still stood bleeding and mangled, the soldiers burst into the convent, and mad with disappointment, immediately slew them all,-" thus restoring them, as in charity we may suppose," says the grave and sweet chronicler, "to a new and inviolable beauty."

Another quaint old legend of Acre has the flavor of pure Stoicism.

In the days of St. Louis, one of the monks encountered an old woman threading the streets of Acre with a cruse of water and a pan of coals. He asked her why she carried them. The water to extinguish hell, said she, and the fire to burn up Paradise, that then the selfishness of man may be subdued, and he may love God for himself alone.

The bazaars were busy in Acre. The life of the town was concentrated around the shops, which are called as

gay as those of Aleppo, and the turbaned gossips with the slouching soldiery criticized the Howadji as they rode slowly through out of the ruined little town.

The beach between Acre and Mount Carmel is not surpassed in my memory. Certainly none so spacious connects two points so variously famous.

The sea smoothed the crescent shore, and polished a black marble pavement for our going. The brilliant day was melting into the tenderness of evening light, but was still so soft and glowing that I could well fancy Palestine once more beloved of the Lord. All day we had seen Mount Carmel from Acre, hazy in the distance; and it was hard to feel, as we looked at it, galloping over the beach, that it was Elijah's mount, and that the sparkling sea was the same over which the boy saw the cloud of a hand's size gathering.

It was hard to feel this, because the Mediterranean had invaded the gravity of the Syrian journey, and the serious thoughts which it is impossible to escape among the hills of Galilee, were smothered in the flowers of Zabulon. The sea brought the vision and remembrance of other lands which it laved. The austere imagery of prophetic times melted in the glad day. Zabulon whispered-" Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these," and the vision of solemn-eyed prophets faded.

Moreover, the landscape of all famous stories has a character which the eye can never see. Even when you have stood upon Marathon, and have seen the mountains. which look down upon it, imagination, despite memory,