Thy courts, thy ways of men;
His footsteps on thy holy hills
Are beautiful as then;
The prayer, whose bloody sweat betrayed
His human agony,
Still haunts the awful olive-shade
Of old Gethsemane.”
To him the past was real. He saw the fields of corn, the ancient olive-trees, the high walls, and the high towers, upon which the Saviour looked. He saw again Abraham, Samuel, Saul, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Pilate, and their associates. He walked in imagination in the welcoming crowd as they strewed the branches along the path from Bethany to Jerusalem. He saw the council chamber, the cross, and the ascension. He dreamed of the gathering armies at Antioch and Joppa, whose banners at last waved over the palace of Godfrey of Bouillon in Jerusalem. To him the gates of history swung wide open, and he wandered back through the centuries, meeting patriarch and maiden, shepherd and warrior, prophet and judge, seer and apostle, in a companionship social and confidential. It was like long generations of experience to walk those hallowed fields and realize the wonderful tales of history. In this, as much as in the views of the present, is found the profit resulting from travel in such lands. One lives over the tales of which he has read, with each locality serving as a fresh reminder of the unnoted details. He is an old man in experience who has travelled in the right spirit over those eldest lands of the world; and few indeed is the number of tourists who can feel that they have done so.
Mr. Taylor, like Longfellow, Tennyson, and Scott, had a gift of looking through the present into the past, and held delightful communion with the old days. Trying, however, with a laudable desire to instruct his readers, he kept studiously close to the simple facts of his actual experience, and in his narrative seldom allowed himself to fall into poetical expressions.
He left Egypt about the middle of the month of April and landed at Beyrout, which was not at that time, nor since, a very attractive locality. It was made more unpleasant to him by an incarceration in a kind of prison called the “Quarantine.” But with a resignation worthy of the oldest Turk, he made the best of his circumstances, and judging by the account he has given of it, he had an easy, jolly time of it. Released from the prison he travelled down the shore of the Mediterranean to Tyre, with whose remnant he seems to have been deeply impressed. The old Tyre, with its fleets, with its enormous stocks of merchandise, with its lofty piles of cedar timber, with its gorgeous purple robes, with its bulwarks and battlements, with its armed defenders and hosts of besiegers, arose from its crumbled fragments and passed through the panoramic changes which so startle the student of Syrian history.