and asses pass laden with goat skins of wine, you understand why "no man putteth new wine into old bottles."

These things impress you with the reality of that life. If a Teacher were now walking up and down the land, and were illustrating his words by the objects that met his eyes, you would constantly hear the familiar figures of the gospels. And these unchanged aspects of landscape and life surviving through all vicissitudes of race and fortune, annihilate time, and make you the contemporary of Jesus, as in the Pestum temples you are a fellow-citizen of Pericles.

We emerged upon the upper valley of the Jordan. It is broad and beautiful, but desolate, like the rest of the country. Scattered Bedoueen camps and cattle were the only population. Luxuriant grain waved on every hand, which is harvested by the Bedoueen, who come in for that purpose from the desert. Flowers grow rankly, and the plain was so spacious and mountain-walled, that there is nothing fairer in its kind, except, perhaps, the Swiss valley of Unterwalden.

Crossing the main stream of the Jordan upon a picturesque ruined bridge, of Roman construction, which commands a view of the whole valley, and beyond which are remains of a Roman way, the only proper road in Palestine, we began to ascend the spurs of the Gebel Shekh, or Mount Hermon, toward Panias, and so reached our last station in the Holy Land.

XX.

Panias.

PANIAS is the true point at which to take leave of Palestine, for there what is most beautiful in human history, mingles with what is most sublime. At Panias, the grace of Grecian story blends with the gravity of Christian ethics.

It is the site of that strange old legend of Plutarch, which Milton, Schiller, and Mrs. Barrett Browning, have sung. Here were the statues of Pan and his peers and nymphs, which fell and shivered, with a moan far resounding over land and sea, at the moment of Christ's nativity. It was even more than a moan, and the words, "Great Pan is dead," swept across the Mediterranean, and were heard by certain mariners.

If, as that poet of the Syrian sunshine has said, "Ever does natural beauty steal in like air and envelope great actions," it is as often true of the sites of beautiful tradition. Certainly the fountain of Egeria, by its waving tapestry of maiden-hair fern, appeals to the eye today, as the story of the nymph appeals to the imagination. Even were there no legend, your musing fancy at the fountain would instinctively create it.

So at Panias, a feeling of poetic tradition inheres in the landscape. It is not lovely and pathetic only, as the Syrian landscape generally is, except on those choice days, when Solomon in all his glory rules the flowery land. But as you turn from the great upper valley of the Jordan, and wind, ascending, among the warm, oakcovered slopes, and see at length the Italian picturesqueness which embosoms the town-then imagination demands a legend.

You find it, and it is the most striking of all.

You will well remember Panias, because you stand there as a man whose sympathy does not begin with a time or a person, but which acknowledges the same imperial truth and beauty under whatever masques.

It was the Cesarea Philippi of the New Testament. There is no record that Jesus was ever farther north, than this spot. Yet here you wonder if he did not go on, and look at Damascus, as at Nazareth you wonder if he ever went down through Zabulon to the sea. Probably not, for had he done so, it would have reappeared in the imagery of his teachings, as did the other large and simple features of what he saw.

A lofty cliff overhangs Panias, and in its face the niche is hollowed in which the statues stood.

You will figure Jesus standing before the grotto; but he will not seem to you to scorn the statues as idols— which was the weakness of Mohammad at Mecca,-but to reverence in them the holy instinct of Beauty from which all art springs. He would not have shared the very error he condemned in idolatry, namely, the confu

sion of the substance with the shadow, but, whatever superstition may have seen in those statues, he would have recognized their significance. "I come not to destroy but to fulfill." The invisible world made visible in these fair forms, he would say, is yet fairer than they suggest.

He who was baptized in Jordan would not fright the delicate Naiads. He who loved the birds of the air which nestled in the trees, would not harm even in thought, the Dryads and Nymphs. He who saw in the untoiling flowers a richer royalty than Solomon's, would not have scorned the airy forms of their spirits in men's imaginations. He who perceived in all the lavish glory of Nature, the presence of perfect Love, would not have chided the instinct which gave it a personality of perfect Beauty. The idolatry he would not endure; but to him the Statue was a symbol, not an Idol.—

No, sweet singer, it is not true that,

"Earth outgrows the mythic fancies

Sung beside her in her youth,

And those debonaire romances

Sound but dull beside the Truth."

For art is that debonaire romance in which Truth is wedded with Beauty. And that Mythology was the great achievement of Art in giving to your soul of "truest truth," the face of "fairest Beauty."

Thus as the sun sinks over the mountains, and through a fig-tree at the entrance of the grotto, the red light is distilled into golden green within, you remember that Jesus

stood here, and wish that the source of the Jordan was indeed in the grotto, as was long supposed, that he might have been baptized in water flowing thence. As his image fades in your mind, and for the last time you look upon any landscape that he might have seen, your heart cries, even as he there might have cried

"Do ye leave your rivers flowing

All alone, O Naiades,

While your drenched locks dry slow in
This cold, feeble sun and breeze?

From the gloaming of the oak wood
O ye Dryads, could ye flee?

At the rushing thunder stroke would
No sob tremble through the tree?

Have ye left the mountain places
Oreads wild, for other tryst,

Shall we see no sudden faces

Strike a glory through the mist ?"—

And at midnight as you lie musing in your tent, soothed by the gurgling murmur of the streams that make the Jordan, thinking those unutterable thoughts which throng the silence of Palestine, and will forever look solemnly after you when you are gone, like the angel with flaming sword from the gate of Paradise upon Adam and Eve departing-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,