Yes, youthful impressions and poetic fancies embalmed in immortal verse meant more to me than did the latest teachings of geologists and Assyriologists with all their display of learning and cocksureness. This was particularly true when we first caught sight of the palm-fringed Euphrates and the sand-mantled ruins of Babylon. The Euphrates is the one river which the great majority of serious students have always held was, without doubt, one of the four rivers of Eden. And Babylon, I hardly know why, I have always looked upon as being as intimately associated with the cradle of our race as is the Euphrates. Both of them were then to me tangible landmarks on the site of the Terrestrial Paradise and when I read Wo Lag das Paradies I could not but hope that future researches would prove that the scholarly Berlin Professor had at last succeeded in locating the site of humanity’s birthplace and, in so doing, had definitively solved one of the greatest riddles of the ages.
And as we came near to Hillah—which is supposed to have formed a part of Babylon in the days of its greatness—and caught our first view of its magnificent groves of date palms, I loved to fancy that they were, as the Talmud teaches, the actual scions of those which flourished in the “Garden of God” and which supplied food and shelter to the father and mother of mankind.
But a more charming sight was awaiting us. It was a beautiful garden adjoining the home where a kindly and well-to-do Arab gave us hospitality while we visited Babylon and its vicinity. In this garden were stately date palms, waving lazily in the soft and scented breeze, orange and other trees laden with golden fruits, and the plantain named the Musa Paradisaica[486] and countless flowers of most gorgeous colors and most grateful fragrance. How vividly this garden recalled the one by God “in the East of Eden planted,” of which Milton sings:
In this pleasant soil
His far more pleasant Garden God ordain’d;
Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow
All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste.
And how a favored nook, distinguished by a riot of flowers, caused this fair garden to remind us still more vividly of the blissful bower where our first parents found their happiest and most blissful home! Watered by “many a rill” of the Edenic river which flowed gently by it,
It was a place
Chosen by the sov’reign planter, when he framed