IMPRESSIONS OF PALESTINE 



317 



comprehension of its meaning, no height- 

 ened emotion, except that which the 

 thought that they are looking upon the 

 very hills, perhaps treading the very paths 

 that were trodden by the feet of Christ 

 and the Apostles, naturally arouses. The 

 narrative remains to them in just the 

 same ideal, non-local atmosphere which 

 surrounded it in their childhood. It still 

 belongs to the realm of the abstract, to 

 the world of the soul rather than to the 

 world of physical nature. It is robed not 

 in the noonday glare of Palestine, as they 

 see it today, nor even in the rich purple 

 which her sunsets shed upon the far-off 

 hills, but in a celestial light that never 

 was on sea or land. 



TYPICAL pilgrim's VIEWPOINT 



These persons, however, mostly Prot- 

 estants, are the few exceptions. The 

 typical pilgrim, be he or she a Roman 

 Catholic Legitimist from France or an 

 unlettered peasant from Russia, accepts 

 everything and is edified by everything. 

 The Virgin and the saints have always 

 been so real to these devout persons, the 

 sense of their reality heightened by con- 

 stant prayers before the Catholic image 

 or the Russian icon, that it is natural for 

 the pilgrim to think of them as dwelling 

 in the very spots which the guide points 

 out, and the marvelous parts of the leg- 

 ends present to them no difficulty. 



The French Catholic has probably been 

 on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and drawn 

 health from the holy spring in its sacred 

 cavern. The Russian peasant has near 

 his home some wonder-working picture. 

 The world to him is still full of religious 

 miracles, and Palestine is but the land in 

 which the figures who consecrate the 



spots are the most sacred of all those 

 whom Christianity knows. To him to die 

 in it is happiness, for death is the portal 

 to Heaven. Nowhere else does one see a 

 faith so touching in its simplicity. 



A ROMANTIC JOURNEY 



To all travelers who have anything of 

 poetry in their hearts, be they pilgrims or 

 tourists, or critical archeologists and his- 

 torians, there is, and there will always 

 be, an inexpressible romance in this jour- 

 ney. Palestine is preeminently the Land 

 of the Past — a land whose very air is 

 charged with the human emotions and 

 the memories of human action, reaching 

 far back into the dim twilight of prehis- 

 toric centuries. 



No one who is in any degree suscepti- 

 ble to the impressions of nature or of 

 history can help feeling the glamour of 

 the country. The colors of distant hills, 

 seen at morn or even through this clear, 

 keen air, seem rich and sad with pathos 

 of ages of human effort and human pas- 

 sion. The imagination is always trying 

 to body forth the men and women who 

 lived beneath these skies, the heroes of 

 war and the saints of suffering, the name- 

 less poets, and the prophets who live on 

 in their burning words, and to give them 

 visible form and life. 



Imagination always fails, but it never 

 desists from the attempt, and though it 

 cannot visualize the scenes, it feels the 

 constant presence of these shadowy fig- 

 ures. In them, shadowy as they are, in 

 the twilight of far-off ages, the primal 

 forces of humanity were embodied — in 

 them its passionate aspirations seem to 

 have their earliest, simplest, and most 

 moving expression. 



