If there is any land where every grain of sand and every blade of grass is pervaded by thrilling associations, that land is Palestine. Especially and peculiarly animated are its hills and vales to a poet such as Taylor proved to be. It may be that some superficial and matter-of-fact people who have visited the Holy Land in the hot season, have not felt the charm of its sacredness, owing to heat, barrenness, vermin, and beggars. There may be a small class of iconoclastic jokers, who, caring not how holy or tender the theme, never fail to use it for ridicule, if it suits their humoristic purpose. But the large class of travellers who visit Jerusalem and the country round about, feel the inspiring presence of the Past, and enjoy in an indescribable fullness the associations connected with it. In a higher and nobler degree, the mind imbued with poetic images, a ready imagination, and a keen discernment of beauty in landscape or history, will avail itself of the great opportunities for pleasure and profit which such a land supplies. In this sense Mr. Taylor enjoyed a great advantage. He made his physical being so subordinate to his mental, that no fatigue, no hunger, no thirst, no annoyance from beggars, nor fears of robbers, could interfere with the appreciation of the beautiful. How greatly he enjoyed his visit to Palestine, none but intimate friends ever knew. In his letters, he often gave way to enthusiastic expressions, and in his book, often gave very vivid descriptions of what had been, as well as that which then existed. But a fear of exaggeration through praise, and a modest misgiving lest his poetical fancy should not suit his readers, led him to write in a more prosy vein than he talked. In conversation with friends in Germany and America, and often in his lectures, after he had finished his tours, he graphically pictured the impressive events of the past connected with Palestine, which seemed to pass like a panorama before him. To him, such a land would be full of interest, whether he trod its fields at a time of the year when it was luxuriant, or at a season when the sun and simoon have made it a desert. To lie upon its burning sands and dream of the sweltering hosts that fought around the spot; to bask in the cool shades of its olives and cedars, and think of Gethsemane and the sweets of Sharon; to stand on the summit of the Mount of Olives, Carmel, or Hermon, and realize the almost overwhelming fact that before him were the plains, hills, valleys, conquered and reconquered since man was made, and which were peopled by the great, the good, the wild, and the bloodthirsty of every age; to recognize the localities where dwelt or fought the heroes of Holy Writ; to feel the presence of the King of kings as “on mysterious wings” he swept the plain and shielded his people; to walk on the very path whereon the Son of God had often placed his feet; to dream in the starlight of Apostles, priests, Romans, Crusaders, and Saracens, was an experience especially gratifying to him, and interesting to a greater or less degree to all travellers. The writer recalls, perhaps in an imperfect form, a verse which Mr. Taylor wrote during his stay in Palestine, and which came to the writer with singular force while carelessly wandering along the valley between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.

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.

After leaving the village which now replaces the ancient city, he rode down the sandy shore and composed a poem which was afterwards somewhat changed, but in which was retained the boldness of the waves, which then beat at his feet.

One of the most sublime experiences of life is to stand where he stood, with the great waves rolling up the beach and shaking the earth with their powerful surges, and with the spray breaking about the dark ruins of the ancient city, and there repeat the poem from which the above verses are taken. It gives power and life to the words which can never be felt or seen by those who have never heard the bellowings or felt the shocks of the Mediterranean surf.

From Tyre he ascended Mount Carmel, and following the shore to Jaffa, took the usual route to Jerusalem. It was the most pleasant season of the year (April), and all vegetation was fast springing into its bountiful life. The cactus, orange, and pomegranate were in bloom, and all nature seemed in its most cheerful mood. So like a paradise did it look to him, that it was some little time before he could get into that frame of mind which brought a realization that he was in that land of great renown. But as that thrilling moment arrived when he stepped upon the highest plateau of the mountains near Jerusalem and looked with astonished eyes over the valley and on the “City of our God and the mountain of his holiness,” he felt, with a sudden thrill, that he was in the presence of the Great and the Holy. With emotions that cannot be described he rode over those sacred fields and entered the gates of the city.

From Jerusalem he made an excursion, by the way of Bethany, to the Dead Sea. It was a sultry day, and he suffered much from the heat, having therein a suggestion of the rain of fire and brimstone which destroyed the cities whose ruins are supposed to be petrified at the bottom of the Dead Sea. With his usual hardihood he plunged fearlessly into the bituminous waters of the Dead Sea, and seemed to enjoy what no traveller who has since indulged in that bath is known to have enjoyed, the buoyance of the water and the sensations caused by the volcanic materials held in solution.

On his return to the city he remained for several days examining the sacred localities and contending with the crowds of beggars and guides who blocked the narrow and filthy streets of Jerusalem. The wretchedness, poverty, disease, and filth of the people are so prominent and so loathsome, that unless the ordinary traveller keeps constantly on his guard, he will forget all the old and holy associations in his disgust for the city of to-day. It is said that the city is less dirty and less stricken with disease than it was in 1850. If such be the fact, it is a marvel indeed how Mr. Taylor ever found a fit place for his Muse, which so frequently visited him there. He seems, however, to have been deeply interested in everything, having about as little faith in what the guides told him about the locality of the Holy Sepulchre, Calvary, Gethsemane, and the true cross, as travellers in more modern times appear to entertain. Jerusalem was not only all that we have represented it to be outwardly, but the people would lie beyond the fables of any other people; would steal and would murder. To be much troubled by these facts would destroy the poetry of the place, and Mr. Taylor allowed none of those things to move him. He wrote of the facts as he found them, uncolored by the imagination, and seems to have flattered himself that he was not as sentimental as the travellers who had preceded him. If he was so very practical, whence such beautiful poetry?

On the 7th of May he left Jerusalem, in company with another traveller and the mule-drivers, taking the route by way of Samaria to Nazareth through a country at that season covered with the richest and freshest foliage. Along the entire route the tourist seldom passes out of sight of broken columns, falling fortresses, gray old monasteries, dismal hermitages, and Roman masonry. The olive and fig trees shaded the path, and with the wide fields of grain gave the appearance of thrift and enterprise. He visited Shechem, where it is said that Joseph was buried, and near which he was thrown into the pit by his brethren. There Mr. Taylor saw Samaritans of the original stock, and there he was shown an ancient manuscript of Hebrew Law, said to be three thousand years old.

He made a short stop at Nazareth and was shown where the mother of Christ had resided, the table from which Christ ate, and the school-room (?) in which Christ is said to have been taught.

Going thence he ascended Mount Tabor, as it was his custom to climb all the mountains he could reach, and then hastened on to the Sea of Galilee. There he swam in its crystal water, and visited the Mount of Beatitudes, Joseph’s Well, and Magadala, the home of Mary Magdalene. Passing Cesarea Philippi, and crossing the anti-Lebanon range of mountains in imminent danger of robbery and death from the rebellious tribes of Druses which inhabited that region, they came out on the afternoon of May 19th in view of the lovely city of Damascus.

Mr. Taylor made a sketch of himself as he appeared in his Eastern costume, while seated on an eminence that afternoon, overlooking the most ancient city in the world. In one of the rooms of Mr. Taylor’s lovely home of Cedarcroft there hangs a large painting, of considerable merit, and said to be an excellent portrait, which was executed by a friend from that sketch. It represents Mr. Taylor sitting in Oriental posture, on the mountain-side, with the domes, minarets, and embowered walls of Damascus on the distant plain. He always held that painting to be a treasure, connecting him, as it did, with those scenes of early travel, and with the friend who made the painting, and with those who admired it.

He was delighted with Damascus. It was placed in the centre of a plain whereon grew in the greatest abundance all the fruits and all the varieties of leaf and blossom known to the tropic zone. No other spot yet explored can boast such beautiful trees; such a profusion of roses; such blossoms of jessamine and pomegranate; such loads of walnuts, figs, olives, apricots; such luxuriant grasses, and such productive fields, as that land which has been cultivated by man the longest. Nature has set the crown upon Damascus and blessed it with a superabundance of vegetable life. But what is given to verdure seems to be taken from humanity, for, regarded as a whole, he found the people of the city to be a rather bad lot. Yet there, as elsewhere, he found agreeable companions and warm friends. He made himself so much at home that he soon appeared like a native, and all the labyrinths of bazars and alleys were as familiar to him after a few days’ stay as they seemed to be to the oldest resident. He liked their life so well that he soon learned to enjoy to its full the physical comfort and mental rest of the Turkish bath. He ever after referred to the bath at Damascus as the acme of bodily satisfaction. The fact that so many travellers have been disappointed in the enjoyment of the bath does not show Mr. Taylor’s account to be so much overdrawn, as it shows the difference between the pleasure to be derived from the pastimes of any people by those who adhere more or less to their own tastes and customs, and those who, like Mr. Taylor, fall wholly and heartily into the ways and thoughts of the native. When in Damascus, he not only did as they do outwardly, but he set his mind in the same channel, and knew what it was to be a Turk in aspirations as well as in dress. No other traveller known to literature ever entered so completely into the experience and social companionship of the people whom he visited.

In order that he might leave no habit untried which came within his reach, he took a potion of hashish, to test its strength and effects. The drug did not begin to intoxicate him quite as soon as he expected, and he doubled the dose, thus taking six times as much as would intoxicate an ordinary Turk. It made him terribly ill; and it was almost miraculous that he survived the shock to his system. He did not try the strength of that drug again. Among the friends he made, and whose home he visited at Damascus, was a family of Maronite Christians, who, eight years later, were heinously butchered by the Moslems during the great massacre following the Druses’ and Marnoites’ dispute in 1860.