PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
| No. CCCCLXVII. | SEPTEMBER, 1854. | Vol. LXXVI. |
THE HOLY LAND.[[1]]
Strong and many are the claims made upon us by our mother Earth; the love of locality—the charm and attraction which some one homely landscape possesses to us, surpassing all stranger beauties, is a remarkable feature in the human heart. We who are not ethereal creatures, but of a mixed and diverse nature—we who, when we look our clearest towards the skies, must still have our standing-ground of earth secure—it is strange what relations of personal love we enter into with the scenes of this lower sphere. How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of reality—a place, a country, a local habitation—how the events of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us;—here is some sunny garden or summer lane, beatified and canonised for ever with the flood of a great joy; and here are dim and silent places, rooms always shadowed and dark to us, whatever they may be to others, where distress or death came once, and since then dwells for evermore. As little as we can deprive ourselves of the human frame, can we divest our individual history of its graceful garment of place and scene. Such a thing happened, we say; but memory is no bare chronicler of facts and events, and as we say the words, the time starts up before us, with all its silent witnesses;—leaves that were shed years ago, trees cut down and gone, yet they live in our thoughts with the joy or the sorrow of which they were silent attendants. We have caught and appropriated these bits of still life—they are a part of our history, and belong to us for ever.
In some degree every mind must have its own private gallery of pictures, impossible to be revealed to the vision of another,—from the homely imagination which cherishes that one bit of sunshine on its walls, “the house where I was born,” the old childish paradise and ideal, rich with such flowers and verdure as can be found in no other place, to the stately and well-furnished recollection which can roam at will through all the brightest countries in the world; but wherever we go, we weave ourselves into the landscape, and make every milestone a historical monument in the chronicle of our life.
And so it comes that natives of a country never expatriated from their home-soil, grow into a passionate veneration and love for their own land. The hills which are radiant for ever with their dreams of youth—the rivers whose familiar voices have chimed into every sound of their lamentation and their joy—the roads that echo to their daily footsteps, and all the silent accessories upon which, as on so many props and pillars, their thoughts for years are hung—the very sight of which recall a hundred fleeting fancies—the very name of which spreads pictures lovelier than reality before closed eyes—the “kindly” country, which seems to respond with a voice borrowed from our own past thoughts to the thoughts of to-day, suggesting ancient comforts, ancient blessings, silently speaking hope from experience, solace present from solace past, lays claims upon us, the most intimate of our confidants, the nearest to our bosom; and Nature lavish in her demands upon our sympathy—perpetually calling upon us to weep with her and to rejoice with her—makes liberal recompense, and softens around us with a visible embrace our mother country, our sympathetic and consolatory home.
And scarcely less are we moved by localities sacred to the heroes of our race—storied ground, peopled with names and persons historic in the national annals, or consecrated to other lives than ours. It is natural for us to seek those spots with eager interest, to believe ourselves brought nearer to the great Spirit whose habitation made them famous, and to linger with visionary satisfaction, looking at things which he must have looked at, realising his life where he led it. Pilgrimages many grow out of this natural sentiment. The cottage of Shakespeare—the palace of Scott—the “warm study of deals,” where the Scottish Reformer belaboured Satan—and the dark-browed rooms where hapless Mary accomplished her fate. From these shrines we come no wiser—not a whit better acquainted with the saint of each—notwithstanding we stand in the same space, we look upon the same walls, we have over us the hallowed roof, and the instinctive superstition is satisfied with this limited result of our faith.
But places sacred to one nation are indifferent to another—one class of men exult over a monument, which to their neighbours is but a block of stone. Yet there is one holy place where all the nations of the earth come together to worship—one country rich with a perpetual attraction. The soil thrills to the consecrating touch of love and grief; the ages of the past dwell in it as in a sanctuary. Making no account of the wandering handful of wild Asiatics who surround him, the traveller there seeks not scenes of to-day, but cities of the dead. The place has a solemn array of lofty inhabitants, undying fathers of the soil; generation after generation, conquerors, defenders, devotees, have come and gone and departed. But we do not search this country for traces of the Saracen or the Crusader; passing beyond them as modern visitors, a more ancient race claims the universal awe. It is not the city of Godfrey of Bouillon, but of David of Bethlehem, which shines on yonder cluster of hills; and these are not the knightly names of romance which sanctify the tombs. The brave Crusaders claim memories in other countries, but they have no memory here where their blood watered the sacred soil. Turk and Christian, creatures of to-day, stand on the same platform as we do,—beyond the earliest of them are the true monuments and memories of this country—