lightsome hand: it is fastened with a padlock(the only new-looking thing)—and is stained with thick green damp; you climb it, and bury yourself in the deep shade, and strive but lazily with the tangling briers, and stop for long minutes to judge and determine whether you will creep beneath the long boughs, and make them your archway, or whether perhaps you will lift your heel and tread them down underfoot. Long doubt, and scarcely to be ended, till you wake from the memory of those days when the path was clear, and chase that phantom of a muslin sleeve that once weighed warm upon your arm.

Wild as that, the nighest woodland of a deserted home in England, but without its sweet sadness, is the sumptuous garden of Damascus. Forest-trees, tall and stately enough, if you could see their lofty crests, yet lead a tussling life of it below, with their branches struggling against strong numbers of bushes and wilful shrubs. The shade upon the earth is black as night. High, high above your head, and on every side all down to the ground, the thicket is hemmed in, and choked up by the interlacing boughs that droop with the weight of roses, and load the slow air with their damask breath.* There are no other flowers. Here and there, there are patches of ground made

The rose-trees which I saw were all of the kind we call "damask;" they grow to an immense height and size.

clear from the cover, and these are either carelessly planted with some common and useful vegetable, or else are left free to the wayward ways of Nature, and bear rank weeds, moist-looking, and cool to your eyes, and freshening the sense with their earthy and bitter fragrance. There is a lane opened through the thicket, so broad in some places that you can pass along side by side-in some so narrow (the shrubs are for ever encroaching) that you ought, if you can, to go on the first, and hold back the bough of the rose-tree. And through the sweet wilderness a loud rushing stream flows tumbling along, till it is halted at last in the lowest corner of the garden, and there tossed up in a fountain by the side of the simple alcove. This is all.

Never for an instant will the people of Damascus attempt to separate the idea of bliss from these wild gardens and rushing waters. Even where your best affections are concerned, and you,— wise preachers abstain and turn aside when they come near the mysteries of the happy state, and we (wise preachers, too), we will hush our voices, and never reveal to finite beings the joys of the Earthly Paradise."

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CHAPTER XXVIII.

PASS OF THE LEBANON.

"THE ruins of Baalbec!" Shall I scatter the vague solemn thoughts, and all the airy phantasies which gather together, when once those words are spoken, that I may give you instead, tall columns, and measurements true, and phrases built with ink? No, no; the glorious sounds shall still float on as of yore, and still hold fast upon your brain with their own dim and infinite meaning.

The pass by which I crossed the Lebanon is like, I think, in its features, to that of the Foorca in the Bernese Oberland. For a great part of the way, I toiled rather painfully through the dazzling snow, but the labour of ascending added to the excitement with which I looked for the summit of the pass. The time came. There was a minute, and I saw nothing but the steep, white shoulder of the mountain; there was another minute, and that the next, which showed me a nether heaven

My

of fleecy clouds clouds floating along far down in the air beneath me, and showed me beyond, the breadth of all Syria west of the Lebanon. But chiefly I clung with my eyes to the dim steadfast line of the sea which closed my utmost view. I had grown well used of late to the people and the scenes of forlorn Asia-well used to tombs and ruins, to silent cities and deserted plains, tò tranquil men, and women sadly veiled; and now that I saw the even plain of the sea, I leapt with an easy leap to its yonder shores, and saw all the kingdoms of the West in that fair path that could lead me from out of this silent land straight on into shrill Marseilles, or round by the pillars of Hercules, to the crash and roar of London. place upon this dividing barrier was as a man's puzzling station in eternity, between the birthless past, and the future that has no end. Behind me I left an old and decrepit world religions dead and dying-calm tyrannies expiring in silence-women hushed, and swathed, and turned into waxen dolls love flown, and in its stead mere royal, and "Paradise," pleasures. Before me there waited glad bustle and strife-love itself, an emulous game-religion a cause and a controversy, well smitten and well defended-men governed by reasons and suasion of speech-wheels going— steam buzzing—a mortal race, and a slashing pace, and the devil taking the hindmost taking me,

by Jove! (for that was my inner care,) if I lingered too long, upon the difficult pass that leads from thought to action.

I descended, and went towards the West.

The group of cedars remaining on this part of the Lebanon is held sacred by the Greek Church, on account of a prevailing notion that the trees were standing at the time when the Temple of Jerusalem was built. They occupy three or four acres on the mountain's side, and many of them are gnarled in a way that implies great age; but except these signs, I saw nothing in their appearance or conduct that tended to prove them contemporaries of the cedars employed in Solomon's Temple. The final cause to which these aged survivors owed their preservation was explained to me in the evening by a glorious old fellow (a Christian chief), who made me welcome in the valley of Eden. In ancient times the whole range of the Lebanon had been covered with cedars; and as the fertile plains beneath became more and more infested by Government officers and tyrants of high and low estate, the people by degrees abandoned them, and flocked to the rugged mountains for protection, well knowing that the trouble of a walk up-hill would seriously obstruct their weak and lazy oppressors. The cedar forests gradually shrank under the axe of the encroaching multitudes, and seemed at last