Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/101

 tries—Egypt, Arabia, Persia, or Mesopotamia. To find the climate of Palestine in winter, or in summer, we must include a fifteen degrees of latitude, northward and southward of its own.

Already we have adverted to those physical changes in the surrounding countries which, in the course of thirty centuries, have very materially affected the climate of Palestine: the reality of such changes can hardly be doubted. Throughout the Psalms, the Book of Job, and the Prophets, there are many passages, relating to variations of temperature, and the like, which agree much rather with our experience in England, than they do with what is now common to Syria. This is certain that throughout the ages during which the Biblical literature was produced, the climate of Palestine was such as to render its allusions to the external world easily intelligible to the people of all lands, excepting only those of the arctic circle. How much more intelligible, in this respect, are those books, than they would have been if the Poets and Prophets of the Bible had been dwellers in Mesopotamia, or in Egypt, or in Nubia, or in Libya, or in Thrace, or in Southern Tartary, or in Northern Europe, or in North, or in South America, or in any of the scattered islets of the Eastern Ocean! Palestine, situated at the juncture of continents, at the head of seas, at the centre of travel by camel or ship, is, or it was at the time in question, as to its Fauna and its Flora, a museum land;—as to its