X. NUNC DIMITTIS. THE Arabian poets sing truly of Lebanon, that he bears winter upon his head, spring upon his shoulders, and autumn in his bosom, while summer lies sleeping at his feet. Up from that summer, Baalbec its last blossom for us, the Howadji sadly climbed. The mountainsides were terraced to the highest practicable point, and planted in grain. But, wherever the sun favors, the lustrous vines lie along the ground, goldening and ripening the life that is immortal in the vino d'oro of the Lebanon. The path is thronged with laden mules coming from Beyrout. The sun blisters our faces. They are set westward now, but our hearts cling to the sleeping summer at the feet of Leba non. At noon the ridge is passed, and we look toward the sea. The broad valleys and deep gorges of the mountains open themselves to the illimitable West, which streams into them full of promise and the sun. Lebanon is a country, rather than a mountain, and our way is not a swift descent, but a slow de cline. Little villages are perched upon various points, and a Druse woman passes, crowned with the silver horn. Across a broad ravine, miles away, we see as the westering sun slants down the mountain, a melancholy fortified old building, and remember Lady Hester Stanhope. But there is no longer eagerness in our glances, and there is profound sadness in our hearts. In a golden sunset, the tent was pitched for the last time, upon a high mountain point, overlooking the sea. As we watched the darkening Mediterranean, from a little gray village high upon a cliff beyond, fell the sweet music of the evening bell. over. It was the knell of the East. Sweet and clear it rang far down the dark calm of the valley, and out upon the evening sea. The glory of oriental travel was a tale told. The charm of nomadic life was Like youth, that travel and charm come but once, and because the East is the most picturesque scene of travel possible to us, the moon in rising over our last camp, and flowing dreamily over the placid slopes of the Lebanon, was but the image of memory, which steeps the East forever in pensive twilight. So finally lie in the mind all lands we have seen. The highest value of travel is not the accumulation of facts, but the perception of their significance. It is not the individual pictures and statues we saw in Italy, nor the elegance of Paris, nor the comfort of England, nor the splendor of the Orient in detail, which are permanently valuable. It is the breadth they give to experience, the more reasonable faith they inspire in the scope of human genius, the dreamy distances of thought with which they surround life. In the landscape which we enjoy as a varied whole, what do we care for the branching tree or the winding river, although we know that without tree and river there would be no landscape? When Italy, and Syria, and Greece, have become thoughts in your mind, then you have truly travelled. The next morning, under the mulberries and over the stones, we descended to Beyrout, and it was startling to feel how suddenly the spell was broken. A few fat Franks, and a few sailors, and a few bales of cotton, and much sea-port stench, and the mongrel population of a Levantine city, dissolve the dream. Strange in Beyrout is the image of the East, in its still picturesqueness, in its placid repose. A few turbans and snowy beards glide spectrally among the hogsheads and boxes, like the fair forms of dreams lingering upon the awakening eye, among the familiar furniture of the chamber. Yet Beyrout is built upon a long and lovely slope of the Lebanon, and has fine gardens and trellissed balconies overhanging its most summer sea. There, on some enchanted morning, you may inhale for the last time the fragrant Shiraz, taste the last sherbet of roses, and be lost once more in the syren's song. But some May evening, as you recede over that summer sea, and watch the majesty of Lebanon robing itself in purple darkness, and, lapsing deeper into memory, behold the dreamy eyes of Khadra, and the widowed "Joy of the Earth," and the "Delight of the Imagination," and the "Pearl of the East," until night and the past have gently withdrawn Syria from your view, do you sigh that the East can be no longer a dream but a memory, do you feel that the rarest romance of travel is now truly ended, do you grieve that no wealth of experience equals the dower of hope, and say in your heart "What's won is done, Joy's soul lies in the doing !" -Or as a snow-peak of Lebanon glances through the moonlight like a star, do you fear lest the poet |