-The caravan is not yet out of sight, gracious reader, we shall overtake it at a bound when we will, let MacWhirter, therefore, browse, while I hold you here a moment longer.

It confirms the tenor of our thought in this chapter, that the most satisfactory impressions of places we have never seen are derived from poetry. I would also say, in some cases, from music,-for I know no song, no book, no picture, so utterly and exquisitely Venetian, as the Gondola-Lied of Mendelssohn. If the listener truly hear that, he knows what Venice truly is.

In Rome you find yourself repeating Byron and Goethe's hexameters, then, when you most feel Rome, and in Venice it is Byron again, and the unmetred poetry of Beckford, whose lines recur. It is not, I believe, so much because they treat of the objects you are seeing, as because they seem to you the natural, the poetic, and therefore, most profound suggestions of the character of the place. And in the same way, as you advance through the Syrian summer, the fragrant and voluptuous imagery of Solomon's Song is the most felicitous expression of your experience there.

The reason of this is, surely, that the permanent interest of various lands is intellectual. We like them for what they are to us, rather than for what they are in themselves. Yet we cannot know what they are, nor assimilate them to our own advantage, unless we are steeped in their spirit. We must be Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Roman, or we shall never know what Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Rome mean.

Hence arises the abiding charm of books of travel, which are faithful records of individual experience, under the condition, always, that the individual has something characteristic, and dramatic in his organization; that he is heroic in adventure, or of graceful and accurate cultivation, the fundamental condition being, of course, that there is a sympathy between the nature of the man and the country he visits.

Aubrey de Vere's Picturesque Sketches of Greece and Turkey, and Alexander Henry's Adventures in Canada, are models of the heroic and the scholarly books of travel. And as the view taken by a humorous genius of subjects with which it has little sympathy, are genuinely comic and therefore valuable, Dickens' Pictures from Italy is a very entertaining book.

-MacWhirter is disappearing, but I have one more

word.

Akin to what we are saying, and indirectly illustrating its truth, is the fact that we learn more of what we wish to know of past times, namely, of the aspect of their life and character, from the romance of history than from history itself.

The man who knew no more of English history than Shakspeare had taught him, was not ignorant. Scott, in Kenilworth and the Talisman, makes us free not only of the courts of Elizabeth and of the lion-hearted Richard, but of their times as well. And with us, Hawthorne has made appreciable in most living reality the Puritan spirit and form of early New England, as Irving, in his Knick

erbocker and Hudson stories, makes the reader a burgher of New Amsterdam.

These men, these Poets, are but travellers into the dusky realms of the Past, whom the Genius of the Past graciously receives and authorizes to speak for him.

-MacWhirter is fairly out of sight!

Such, heroic reader,-of this kind, must be your story of the desert, if you hope that those distant friends will see what you are seeing. If you think otherwise, let us here courteously part company, and you shall retire in goodly society.

John Carnes, Esq., and Lord Castlereagh, and Volney -Ali Bey and Richardson and Clarke and W. G. Browne, that "model for travellers," and a Xerxes-host of quartos, octavos, and duodecimos, will tell you all that you will not find upon our pages. They have done their work too well to have left any necessity of our doing the same. The sights of this journey they have fully and accurately and learnedly described.

But we, the latest of them all, grateful for the services they have rendered, and for the convenience which they prove to us, have yet something to say which they had not, and that is, our own impression of what they saw.

XIII.

Oasis.

THERE came suddenly a strip of green land.

It was like a branch of flowers yet fresh, drifting out to a ship at sea. The birds sang clearly in the early morning, high over our heads flashing in the bright air. The damp sand was delicately printed with the tracks of birds. The desert lay around us in low hillocks, like the long billows of a retiring ocean. The air blew fresh and sweet from the west. Fresh and sweet, for it was the breath of the Mediterranean.

And suddenly we came upon green land.

The country was like a rolling pasture. Grass and dandelions, and a myriad familiar wild flowers lay, wreaths of welcome, at our feet. There were clumps of palms and single acacias. The cactus, also, that we call Indian fig, shapeless, prickly, but full of the sun and fat with promise.

The wind blew, the birds sang, the trees waved. They were the outposts of Life, whence it nodded and beckoned to us, and threw us flowers as we emerged from the death of the desert.

It was a dream in beauty and in fleetness. MacWhirter,-incarnate common-sense,-bore us straight through the dream into the desert again.

They receded, they sank into vapory distance, those beautiful forms, the waving trees, the singing birds. Yet they were Palestine, they the symbols of the Holy Land. Promises and hopes, they sing and wave upon the ending desert, and I greeted them as the mariner in that ship at sea greets the south and romantic Spain, in the bough of blossoms floating by him.

The strip of green land passed, and we entered upon pure Sahara. It was the softest, most powdery sand; tossed by light winds it drew sharp angles,-glittering white angles, against the dense blue. The last trace of green vanished as we passed deeper among the ridges. The world was a chaotic ocean of sparkling white sand.

The desert was, in that moment, utter and hopeless desert, but was never desert again. Bare, and still, and bright, it was soft beyond expression, in the fitful game of shadows played upon it by the sun,-for vapors were gathering overhead.

Suddenly, around one of the sharp angles, and I could not, until then, tell if it were near or far,-suddenly a band of armed Arabs came riding towards us. They curvetted, and dashed, and caracoled upon spirited horses, leaping, and running, and prancing around imperturbable MacWhirter and El Shiraz, who plodded sublimely on. The Arabs came close to us, and greeted our men with endless kissings and salaams. They chatted and called aloud; their weapons flashed and rattled,