When I am stricken, and my heart,
Like a bruised reed, is waiting to be broken.
How will its love for thee, as I depart,
Yearn for thine ear to drink its last deep token!
It were so sweet, amid death's gathering gloom,
To see thee, Absalom!
And now, farewell! 'Tis hard to give thee up
With death so like a gentle slumber on thee -
And thy dark sin! Oh! I could drink the cup,
If from this woe its bitterness had won thee.
May God have called thee, like a wanderer, home,
My lost boy, Absalom!
But this fountain! What birds and beasts here drank undisturbed
before man came to assert his lordship! What multitudes of people
here have drunk from the days before Israel down to the present
time - the hunter, the tiller of the soil, the grape-gatherer, the
shepherd with his flocks, the warrior and his chief, - all rejoiced
and rested here, and were refreshed and strengthened by the water.
Almost with reverence we drink again; then we remount our horses
and proceed along the wady past the village of Ajlun where an Arab
joins us and guides us on over fertile patches of ground and
through olive groves until we reach the modern town of Coefrinje,
a town that probably contains several thousand inhabitants. It is
in the midst of an olive grove well up on the side of the
mountains. Here, although it is scarcely past the middle of the
afternoon, we stop for the night.
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