If One Might Judge Of Men's Real Thoughts By Their Writings, It
Would Seem That There Are People Who Can
Visit an interesting
locality and follow up continuously the exact train of thought that
ought to be suggested by the
Historical associations of the place.
A person of this sort can go to Athens and think of nothing later
than the age of Pericles; can live with the Scipios as long as he
stays in Rome; can go up in a balloon, and think how resplendently
in former times the now vacant and desolate air was peopled with
angels, how prettily it was crossed at intervals by the rounds of
Jacob's ladder! I don't possess this power at all; it is only by
snatches, and for few moments together, that I can really associate
a place with its proper history.
"There at Tiberias, and along this western shore towards the north,
and upon the bosom too of the lake, our Saviour and His disciples -
" away flew those recollections, and my mind strained eastward,
because that that farthest shore was the end of the world that
belongs to man the dweller, the beginning of the other and veiled
world that is held by the strange race, whose life (like the
pastime of Satan) is a "going to and fro upon the face of the
earth." From those grey hills right away to the gates of Bagdad
stretched forth the mysterious "desert" - not a pale, void, sandy
tract, but a land abounding in rich pastures, a land without cities
or towns, without any "respectable" people or any "respectable"
things, yet yielding its eighty thousand cavalry to the beck of a
few old men.
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