This you will see by-and-by.
I passed by Cana and the house in which the water had been turned
into wine; I came to the field in which our Saviour had rebuked the
Scotch Sabbath-keepers of that period, by suffering His disciples
to pluck corn on the Lord's day; I rode over the ground on which
the fainting multitude had been fed, and they showed me some
massive fragments - the relics, they said, of that wondrous banquet,
now turned into stone. The petrifaction was most complete.
I ascended the height on which our Lord was standing when He
wrought the miracle. The hill was lofty enough to show me the
fairness of the land on all sides, but I have an ancient love for
the mere features of a lake, and so forgetting all else when I
reached the summit, I looked away eagerly to the eastward. There
she lay, the Sea of Galilee. Less stern than Wast Water, less fair
than gentle Windermere, she had still the winning ways of an
English lake; she caught from the smiling heavens unceasing light
and changeful phases of beauty, and with all this brightness on her
face, she yet clung so fondly to the dull he-looking mountain at
her side, as though she would
"Soothe him with her finer fancies,
Touch him with her lighter thought." {26}
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.
