Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/216

 feel it, he will no more find monotony on the banks of the Nile than he could find it in the heaven of unchanging stars.

The peculiar glamour of the palm is, like most other such mysterious appeals to the imagination through the senses, hard to seize and analyse. Yet it is undeniable and unmistakable. In all ages it has captured the romantic temperament and stormed the citadel of the poet's heart. Heine's exquisite lyric, with its image of the northern pine-tree dreaming in the frozen silence of its brother the palm in the burning sands of the desert, does not stand alone, though it does stand before all others. And the tree is as dear to those races who are native to its soil as to the poets and artists of the North.

Tu tambien insigne palma Eres aqui forestiera.

"Thou, too, O noble palm," ran the sweet, sad lament of the Moorish captive in Spain; "thou, too, art a stranger in this land even