Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/98

 vineyards, the olive-groves, the orangeries, of a luxuriant district—and a theatre of peaks, ravines, gorges, and broken precipices, within the circle of which the summers and the winters of all time have effected no change: it is now, as it was thousands of years ago, the land of the Shadow of Death—a land where the lot of man presents itself under the saddest aspects;—for the Earth is there a prison-house, and the sun overhead is the inflicter of torment.

Yet, near to the abodes of a people among whom powerful emotions are to find symbols for their utterance, there is found one other natural prodigy, and such as is unmatched upon the surface of the Earth;—for nowhere else is there a hollow so deep as is this hollow: there is no expanse of water that sends its exhalations into the open sky, resembling at all this lake of bitumen and sulphur. And what might that chasm show itself to be, if the caldron were quite emptied out, or if the waters of the Jordan could be turned aside for a while into the Great Sea, leaving evaporation to go on until the lowest rent were exposed to view! Unfathomed, unfathomable, is this lake at its southern end:—its mysteries, be they what they may, are veiled by these dense waters:—but the traveller, conscious as now he is of the actual depth of the surface—so far below the level of the busy world as it is—needs little aid of the imagination to persuade himself that