CHALDEAN ACCOUNT OF THE CREATION.
In no portion of the world will the adventurous traveller feel himself more impressed by a sense of mystery and of awe than in that vast plain which rises from the Persian Gulf and stretches away northwestwardly along the mountains of Kurdistan until it reaches those of Armenia. From the rivers which water it the Greeks called one portion of it Mesopotamia. Other portions are known as Chaldea and Assyria. In this plain it was that the Lord God planted the Garden of Eden, bringing forth all manner
“Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit.
Blossoms and fruit at once of golden hue
Appeared, with gay enamel’d colors mixed,
On which the sun more glad impress’d his beams
Than in the fair ev’ning cloud or humid bow,
When God shower’d the earth; so lovely seemed
That landskip.”—Par. Lost, b. iv.
Here still How the Euphrates and the Tigris, named in Holy Writ as two of the rivers of Eden. Their waters still fertilize a soil which, desolate and accursed though it now seems, will yield, even to rude and imperfect culture, a harvest of an hundred-fold. Here our first parents spent their too brief hours of innocence. Here, too, driven for their disobedience from Eden, they wandered in sorrow, and tilled the earth in the sweat of their brow.