CHAPTER IV. THE ANCIENT PALESTINE - THE BIRTH-PLACE OF POETRY. OETRY WILL never disown its relationship to the POETRY beautiful and the sublime in the visible world; in fact it has always proved its dependence upon influences of this order. Born and nurtured, not at hazard on any spot, but only in chosen regions, it finds at hand, for giving utterance to the mysteries of the inner life, an abundance of material symbols-fit for fit for purposes of this kind - among the objects of sense. It is the function of Poetry to effect such an assimilation of the material with the immaterial as shall produce one world of thought and of emotion—the visible and the invisible, intimately commingled. Poetry, nursed on the lap of Nature, will have its preferences it must make its selection; and this, not merely as to the exterior decorations of its abode, but even as to the solid framework of the country which it favors; there must be, not only a soil, and a climate, and a various vegetation, favorable to its training; but a preparation must have been made for it in the remotest geological eras. The requirements of a land that is des tined to be the home of poetry have in all instances been very peculiar: it has sprung up and thriven on countries of very limited extent upon areas ribbed and walled about by ranges of mountains, or girdled and cut into by seas. These the duly prepared birth-places of -- rills many poetry have been marked by abrupt inequalities of surface by upheavings and extrusions of the primæval crust of the earth: - these selected lands have glistened with they have sparkled with fountains they have been clothed with ancient forests, as well as decked, each spring anew, with flowers. Moreover a wayward climate, made so by its inequalities of surface, has broken up the wearisome monotony of the year-such as it is in tropical and in arctic regions-by irregular shiftings of the aerial aspect of all things; and there has been, in such countries, a corresponding variety in the animal and vegetable kingdoms; there has thus been a large store in the Poet's treasury of material symbols. A land such as this is or was, three thousand years ago the country in which the Hebrew Poetry had its birth, and where it reached its maturity, and where it ceased to breathe; nor has it been under conditions very different from these that Poetry has ever sprung up and flourished. It has not been a native of Tartarian steppes, nor of savannahs, or interminable prairies, nor of trackless swamps, nor of irrigated rice-levels, nor of leagues on leagues of open corn-land, nor of Saharas. Poetry has not weathered the tempests, nor confronted the terrors of the Atlas ranges: it has not sported on the flanks of Caucasus, or on the steeps of the Andes, or the Himalayas; nor has it breathed on the rugged vertebræ of the North American continent. In none of those regions has it appeared which oppress the spirit by a dreary sameness, or by shapeless magnitudes, or featureless sublimity. Poetry has had its birth, and it has sported its childhood, and it has attained its manhood, and has blended itself with the national life in countries such as Greece, with its rugged hills, and its myrtle groves, and its sparkling rills; but not in Egypt: -in Italy; but not on the dead levels of Northern Europe. Poetry was born and reared in Palestine - but not in Mesopotamia :-in Persia but not in India. Pre-eminently has Poetry found its home among the rural graces of England, and amid the glens of Scotland; and there, rather than in those neighboring countries which are not inferior to the British Islands in any other products of intellect or of taste. Exceptions apparent only, or of a very partial kind -might be adduced in contradiction of these general affirmations. Exceptions there will be to any generalization that touches human nature; for in a true sense the human mind is superior to all exterior conditions; and its individual forces are such as to refuse to be absolutely subjected to any formal requirements: greater is the individual man than circumstances of any sort; and greater is he far than materialists would report him to beaccording to system. A poet there may be, wherever Nature shall call him forth; but there will not be Poetry among a people that is not favored by Nature, as to its home: the imaginative tastes and the creative genius have been, as to the mass of the people, indigenous to Greece; but not to Egypt: to Italy; but not to France: to the British Islands; but not to Holland. And thus too, it was the ancient people of Palestine, pre-eminently, that possessed a poetry which was quite its own. But then we must be looking back a three thousand years, as to the people; and we must be thinking of the country, such as it was in the morning hours of Biblical time. In later ages the people fallen! and the land — mourning its hopeless desolation! Palestine, rather than any other country that might be named, demands the presence, and needs the industry of man, for maintaining its fertility. Capable, as it has been, of supporting millions of people, those millions must actually be there; and then only will it justify its repute as a "very good land." A scanty population will starve, where a dense population would fatten. On this land, emphatically, is the truth exemplified that "the hand of the diligent maketh rich :” — it is here that, if man fails of his duty, or if he misunderstands his own welfare, the very soil disappears under his feet. So has it been now through many dreary centuries; and here has been accomplished the warning — that the sins of the fathers are visited, not only upon the children to the third and fourth generation; but upon their remotest descendants, and to their successors, who may be masters of the land. The desolations of Palestine have been sensibly increased, even within the memory of man; and unquestionably so within periods that are authentically known to history. Those who have visited Palestine, at intervals of fifteen or twenty years, have forcibly received this impression from the aspect of its surface, as well as from the appearance of the people, that decay is still in progress: a ruthless and rapacious rule, dreading and hating reform, withers the industry — such as it might be of the people, and makes the land a fit roaming ground for the Bedouin marauder. A ten years of British rule, and a million or two of British capital, might yet make this land "blossom as the rose" the wilderness and parched land how should they be made glad for such a visitation! Yet beside the social and political causes of decay, some purely physical influences have been taking effect upon Palestine, as upon all the countries that skirt the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Within the lapse of what is called historic time, Libyan wastes have become far more arid than once they were, and, in consequence, they have acquired a higher mean a higher mean temperature. North Africa is much less abundant in corn, and is less graced with tropical vegetation, than in ancient times In the course of two or three thousand years the sand hurricanes of Libya, and of the Sahara, in sweeping over the valley of the Nile, have not only sepulchred its sepulchres, and entombed its temples and palaces in a ten, or twenty, or thirty feet of deposit it was. |