Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/493

Rh 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 fore-world in the celestial amber of clear afternoons. We coast the Sea of Galilee—embosomed in profound solitude and mountainous sternness; and scrutinise its population—the men in sordid rags, with long elfish earlocks, a wan and puny aspect, and a kind of drivelling leer and cunning in the eye—"a singular combination of Boz's Fagin and Carlyle's Apes of the Dead Sea;"—the women, however, even comely, with fair round faces of Teutonic type, and clad in the "coarse substantiality of the German female costume. Longingly and lingeringly we gaze on Damascus, the "Eye of the East"—whose clustering minarets and spires, as of frosted flame, glitter above the ambrosial darkness of endless groves and gardens; the metropolis of Romance, and the well-assured capital of Oriental hope; on the way to no Christian province, and therefore unpurged of virgin picturesqueness by Western trade. Each Damascus house is a Paradise—each interior a poem set to music, a dream palace, such a pavilion as Tennyson has built in melody for Haroun El Raschid In this way doth the Howadji etch his Wanderings in Syria.

His characteristic enthusiasm, scepticism, sentiment, and satire might be illustrated from many a passage. Thus, in Gaza, city which he had vaguely figured to himself when, a child, he listened wondering to the story of Samson, Sunday came to him "with the old Sabbath feeling, with that spirit of devotional stillness in the air which broods over our home Sundays, irksome by their sombre gravity to the boy, but remembered by the man with sweet sadness." Thus he pleads for youth's privilege to love the lotus, and thrive upon it; saying, "Let Zeno frown. Philosophy, common sense, and resignation, are but synonyms of submission to the inevitable. I dream my dream. Men whose hearts are broken, and whose faith falters, discover that life is a warfare, and chide the boy for loitering along the sea-shore, and loving the stars. But leave him, inexorable elders, in the sweet entanglement of the 'trailing clouds of glory' with which he comes into the world. Have no fear that they will remain and dim his sight. Those morning vapours fade away—you have learned it. And they will leave him chilled, philosophical, and resigned, in 'the light of common day'—you have proved it. But do not starve him to-day, because he will have no dinner to-morrow." And these eldern sages are reminded, that the profoundest thinkers of them all have discovered an inscrutable sadness to be the widest horizon of life, and that the longing eye is more sympathetic with Nature, than the shallow stare of practical scepticism of truth and beauty. The "mixed mood" of our Wanderer—at once pointedly indicative, tenderly optative, vaguely infinitive—passes through a strange conjugation: sometimes he sneers, sometimes is almost caught suppressing a sob, often a sigh. He is sarcastic upon tourist Anglo-Catholics at the Calvary Chapel, "holding candles, and weeping profusely"—and upon the Mount Zion Protestant mission, by which "the tribes of Israel are gathered into the fold at the rate of six, and in favourable years, eight converts per annum." He is pathetic on the solicitude of Mary, at the fountain of El Bir, when she discovered, on her homeward route, that the child Jesus had tarried in Jerusalem—and it is her mournful figure that there haunts his