Then, when the impulse passed away, my eyes have turned into fountains of tears, and I have wept until morning came, and the sounds of the world called back its recollections; and for the sacred hills and valleys that I had imagined in the darkness I saw only the roofs of some melancholy city, in which I was a forlorn fugitive; or a wilderness, with but the burning sands and the robber before me; or found myself tossing on the ocean, not more fruitless than my heart, nor more restless than my life, nor more unfathomable than my we. Yet to the last will I hope and love. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! even in my mirth, if I forget thee!
But those were the thoughts of after-times. On that memorable and dreadful day I had no perception but of some undefinable fate which was to banish me from mankind. I at length forced my way through the pressure at the gate, turned to none of the kinsmen who called to me as I passed their chariots and horses, overthrew with desperate and sudden strength all who impeded my progress, and scarcely felt the ground till I had left the city behind, and had climbed, through rocks and ruins, the mountain that rose drearily before me, like a barrier shutting out the living world.
Terror had exhausted me; and throwing myself on the ground, under the shade of the palm-trees that crowned the summit of the hill, I fell into an almost instant slumber. But it was unrefreshing and disturbed. The events of the day again came before me, strangely mingled with those of my past life, and with others of which I could form no waking remembrance. I saw myself sometimes debased below man, like the great Assyrian king, driven out to feed upon the herb of the forest, and wandering for years exposed to the scorching sun by day and the dews that sank chilling upon my naked frame by night; I then seemed filled with supernatural power, and rose on wings till earth was diminished beneath me, and I felt myself fearfully alone. Still, there was one predominant sensation: that all this was for punishment, and that it was to be perpetual. At length, in one of my imaginary flights, I found myself whirled on the wind, like a swimmer down a cataract, in helpless terror into the bosom of a thunder-cloud. I felt the weight of the rolling vapors round me; I saw the blaze; I was stunned by a roar that shook the firmament.
My eyes suddenly opened, yet my dream appeared only to be realized by my waking. Thick clouds of heavy and heated vapor were rapidly rolling up from the precipices below; and at intervals a sound that I could not distinguish from distant thunder burst on the wind. But the sun was bright, and the horizon was the dazzling blue of the eastern heaven. As my senses slowly returned, for I felt like a man overpowered with wine, I was enabled to discover where I was. The discovery itself was terror. I had in my distraction fled to the mountain on which no Jew ever looked without shame and sorrow for the crimes of the greatest king into whose nostrils the Almighty ever poured the spirit of life, but which a Jewish priest, as I was, could not touch without being guilty of defilement. I sat on the Mount of Corruption,[2] so-called from its having once witnessed the idolatries of our mighty Solomon, when, in his old age, he gave way to the persuasions of his heathen wives—that irreparable crime for which the kingdom was rent, and the strength of Israel scattered. I saw in the hollows of the hill the spaces, still bearing the marks of burning, and barren forever, on which the temples of Moloch, Chemosh, and Ashtaroth had stood in sight of the House of the living God. The very palm-trees under which I had snatched that wild and bitter sleep were the remnant of the groves in which the foul rites of the goddesses of Phenicia and Assyria once filled the air with midnight abomination, and horrid yells of human sacrifice, almost made more fearful by the roar of barbarian revel, the wild dissonance of timbrel and horn, the bacchanalian chorus of the priesthood and people of impurity.
The vapors that rose hot and sickly before me were the smokes from the fires kindled in the valley of Hinnom; where the refuse of the animals slaughtered for the use of the city, and the other pollutions and remnants of things abominable to the Jew, were daily burned. The sullen and perpetual fires, the deadly fumes, and the aspects of the beings, chiefly public criminals, who were employed in this hideous task, gave the idea of the place of final evil. Our prophets, in their threats against the national betrayers, against the proud and the self-willed, the polluted with idols, and the polluted with that still darker and more incurable idolatry, the worship of the world, pointed to the valley of Hinnom! The Pharisee, when he denounced the unbelief and luxury of the lordly Sadducee, pointed to the valley of Hinnom! All—the Pharisee, the Essene, the Sadducee, in the haughty spirit that forgot the fallen state of Jerusalem, and the crimes that had lowered her; the hypocrite, the bigot, and the skeptic, alike mad with hopeless revenge, when they saw the Roman cohorts triumphing with their idolatrous ensigns through the paths once trod by the holy, or were driven aside by the torrent of cavalry, and the gilded chariot on which sat some insolent proconsul fresh from Italy,—pointed to the valley of Hinnom! How often, as the days of Jerusalem hurried toward their end and by some fatality the violences of the Roman governors became more frequent and intolerable, have I seen the groups of my countrymen, hunted into some byway of the city by the hoofs of the Roman horse, consuming with that inward wrath which was soon to flame out in such horrors, flinging up their wild hands, as if to upbraid the tardy heavens, gnashing their teeth, and with the strong contortions of the Oriental countenance, and lip scarcely audible from the force of its own convulsion, muttering conspiracy. Or, in despair of shaking off that chain which had bound the whole earth, how often have I seen them appealing to the endless future, and shrouding their heads in their cloaks, like sorcerers summoning up demons, each with his quivering hand stretched out toward the accursed valley, and every tongue groaning “Hinnom!”
While I lay upon the summit of the mountain, in a state which gave me the deepest impression of the parting of soul and body, I was startled by the sound of a trumpet. It was from the Temple, which, as the fires below sank with the growing heat of the day, was now visible to me. The trumpet was the signal of the third hour, when the first daily sacrifice was to be offered. It was the week of the class of Abiah, of which I was, and this day’s service fell to me. Though I would have given all that I possessed on earth to be allowed to rest upon that spot, polluted as it was, and there molder away into the dust and ashes that I had made my bed, I dared not shrink from that most solemn duty of the priesthood.
I rose, but it was not until after many efforts that I was able to stand. I struggled along the summit of the ridge, holding by the stems of the palm-trees. The second trumpet sounded loudly, and was reechoed by the cliffs. I had now no time for delay, and was about to spring downward toward a path which wound round the head of the valley and beyond the fires, when my ears were again arrested by the peal that had disturbed me in my sleep, and my glance, which commanded the whole circuit of the hills round Jerusalem, involuntarily looked for the thunder-cloud. The sky was without a stain; but the eminences toward the west, on whose lovely slopes of vineyard, rose, and orange grove my eye had so often reposed as on a vast Tyrian carpet tissued with purple and gold, were hung with gloom; a huge and sullen cloud seemed to be gathering over the heights, and flashes and gleams of malignant luster burst from its bosom. The cloud deepened, and the distant murmur grew louder and more continued.
I hurried to the city gate. To my astonishment, I found the road, that I had left, so choked up with the multitude, almost empty. The camels stood tethered in long trains under the trees, with scarcely an owner. The tents were deserted except by children and the few old persons necessary for their care. The mules and horses grazed through the fields without a keeper. I saw tents full of the animals and other offerings that the tribes brought up to the great feast, almost at the mercy of any hand that would take them away. Where could the myriads have disappeared which had covered the land a few hours before to the horizon?
The city was still more a subject of astonishment. A panic might have driven away the concourse of strangers, at a time when the violences of the Roman sword had given every Jew but too frequent cause for the most sensitive alarm. But all within the gate was equally deserted. The streets were utterly stripped of the regular inhabitants. The Roman sentinels were almost the only beings whom I could discover in my passage of the long avenue, from the foot of the upper city to the Mount of the Temple. All this was favorable to my extreme anxiety to escape every eye of my countrymen; yet I can not tell with what a throbbing of heart, and variety of feverish emotion, I at length reached the threshold of my dwelling. Though young, I was a husband and father. What might not have happened since the sunset of the evening before? for my evil doings—for which may He, with whom mercy lies at the right hand and judgment at the left, have mercy on me—had fatally occupied the night. I listened at the door, with my heart upon my lips. I dared not open it. My suspense was at length relieved by my wife’s voice; she was weeping. I fell on my knees, and thanked Heaven that she was alive.
But my infant! I thought of the sword that smote the first-born in the land of bondage, and felt that Judah, guilty as Egypt, might well dread its punishment. Was it for my first-born that the sobs of its angel mother had arisen in her loneliness? Another pause of bitter suspense—and I heard the laugh of my babe as it awoke in her arms. The first human sensation that I had felt for so many hours was almost overpowering; and without regarding the squalidness of my dress, and the look of famine and fatigue that must have betrayed where I had been, I should have rushed into the chamber. But at that moment the third trumpet sounded. I had now no time for the things of this world. I plunged into the bath, cleansed myself from the pollution of the mountain, hastily girt on me the sacerdotal tunic and girdle; and with the sacred fillet on my burning brow, and the censer in my shaking hand, passed through the cloisters and took my place before the altar.
Of all the labors of human wealth and power devoted to worship, the Temple within whose courts I then stood was the most mighty. In the years of my unhappy wanderings, far from the graves of my kindred, I have seen all the most famous shrines of the great kingdoms of idolatry. Constrained by cruel circumstance, and the still sterner cruelty of man, I have stood before the altar of the Ephesian Diana, the masterpiece of Ionian splendor; I have strayed through the woods of Delphi, and been made a reluctant witness of the superb mysteries of that chief of the oracles of imposture. Dragged in chains, I have been forced to join the procession round the Minerva of the Acropolis, and almost forgot my chains in wonder at that monument of a genius which ought to have been consecrated only to the true God, by whom it was given. The temple of the Capitoline Jove, the Sancta Sophia of the Rome of Constantine, the still more stupendous fabric in which the third Rome still bows before the fisherman of Galilee—all have been known to my step, that knows all things but rest; but all were dreams and shadows to the grandeur, the dazzling beauty, the almost unearthly glory, of that Temple which once covered the “Mount of Vision” of the City of Jehovah.
At the distance of almost two thousand years, I have its image on my mind’s eye with living and painful fulness. I see the court of the Gentiles circling the whole; a fortress of the purest marble, with its wall rising six hundred feet from the valley; its kingly entrance, worthy of the fame of Solomon; its innumerable and stately buildings for the priests and officers of the Temple, and above them, glittering like a succession of diadems, those alabaster porticoes and colonnades in which the chiefs and sages of Jerusalem sat teaching the people, or walked, breathing the pure air, and gazing on the grandeur of a landscape which swept the whole amphitheater of the mountains. I see, rising above this stupendous boundary, the court of the Jewish women separated by its porphyry pillars and richly sculptured wall; above this, the separated court of the men; still higher, the court of the priests; and highest, the crowning splendor of all, the central TEMPLE,[3] the place of the Sanctuary and of the Holy of Holies, covered with plates of gold, its roof planted with lofty spear-heads of gold, the most precious marbles and metals everywhere flashing back the day, till Mount Moriah stood forth to the eye of the stranger approaching Jerusalem what it had been so often described by its bards and people, “a mountain of snow studded with jewels.”
The grandeur of the worship was worthy of this glory of architecture. Four-and-twenty thousand Levites ministered by turns—a thousand at a time. Four thousand more performed the lower offices. Four thousand singers and minstrels, with the harp, the trumpet, and all the richest instruments of a land whose native genius was music, and whose climate and landscape led men instinctively to delight in the charm of sound, chanted the inspired songs of our warrior king, and filled up the pauses of prayer with harmonies that transported the spirit beyond the cares and passions of a troubled world.
I was standing before the altar of burnt-offerings, with the Levite at my side holding the lamb; the cup was in my hand, and I was about to pour the wine on the victim, when I was startled by the sound of hurried feet. In another moment the gate of the court was abruptly thrown back, and a figure rushed in; it was the High Priest,[4] but not in the robes of ceremony which it was customary for him to wear in the seasons of the greater festivals. He was covered with the common vesture of the priesthood, and was evidently anxious to use it for total concealment. His face was buried in the folds of his cloak, and he walked with blind precipitation toward the sanctuary. But he had scarcely reached it when a new feeling stopped him, and he turned to the altar, where I was standing in mute surprise. The cloak fell from his visage; it was pale as death; the habitual sternness of feature which rendered him a terror to the people had collapsed into feebleness; and while he gazed on the flame, I thought I saw the glistening of a tear on a cheek that had never exhibited human emotion before. But no time was left for question, even if reverence had not restrained me. He suddenly grasped the head of the lamb, as was customary for those who offered up an expiation for their own sins; his lip, ashy white, quivered with broken prayer; then, snatching the knife from the Levite, he plunged it into the animal’s throat, and with his hands covered with blood, and with a groan that sounded despair, again rushed distractedly to the porch of the Holy House, flung aside in fierce irreverence the veil of the sanctuary, and darted in.
There was a subterranean passage from the interior of the sanctuary to the High Priest’s cloister, through which I conceived that he had gone. But, on passing near the porch, at the close of the sacrifice, I heard a cry of agony from within that penetrated my soul.
I had never loved the head of our priesthood. He was a haughty and hard-hearted man; insolent in his office, which he had obtained by no unsuspicious means, and a ready tool alike of the popular caprice and of the tyranny of our foreign masters. But he was a man; was a man of my own order; and was it for one like me to triumph over even the most abject criminal of earth? I ascended the steps of the porch, and, with a sinking heart and trembling hand, entered the sanctuary.
But—what I saw there I have no power to tell! To this moment the recollection overwhelms my senses. Words were not made to utter it. The ear of man was not made to hear it. Before me moved things mightier than of mortal vision, thronging shapes of terror, mysterious grandeurs, essential power, embodied prophecy! The Veil was rent in twain! How could man behold and live! When I lifted my face from the ground again, I saw but the High Priest. He was kneeling, with his hands clasped upon his eyes; his lips strained wide, as if laboring to utter a voice; and his whole frame rigid and cold as a corpse. I vainly spoke, and attempted to rouse him; terror, or more than terror, had benumbed his powers; and, unwilling to suffer him to be seen in this extremity, I bore him in my arms to the subterranean.
But a tumult, of which I could scarcely conjecture the cause, checked me. The trampling of multitudes, and cries of fury and fear, echoed round the Temple; and in the sudden apprehension, the first and most fearful to the priest of Judah, that the Romans were about to commence their often-threatened plunder, I laid down my unhappy burden beside the door of the passage and returned to defend, or die with, our perishing glory. The sanctuary in which I stood was wholly lighted by the lamps round its walls. But when, at length, unable to suppress my alarm at the growing uproar, I went to the porch, I left comparative day behind me; a gloom deeper than that of tempest and sicklier than that of smoke overspread the sky. The sun, which I had seen like a fiery buckler hanging over the city, was utterly gone. Even while I looked the darkness deepened, and the blackness of night, of night without a star, fell far and fearful upon the horizon.
It has been my fate, and an intense part of my punishment, always to conceive that the calamities of nature and nations were connected with my crime.[5] I have tried to reason away this impression, but it has clung to me like an iron chain; nothing could tear it away that left the life; I have felt it hanging over my brain with the weight of a thunder-cloud. As I glanced into the gloom, the thought smote me that it was I who had brought this Egyptian plague, this horrid privation of the first element of life, upon my country, perhaps upon the world, perhaps never to be relieved; for it came condensing, depth on depth, till it seemed to have excluded all possibility of the existence of light; it was, like that of our old oppressors, darkness that might be felt, the darkness of a universal grave.
I formed my fierce determination at once, and resolved to fly from my priesthood, from my kindred, from my country; to linger out my days—my bitter, banished days—in some wilderness, where my presence would not be a curse, where but the lion and the tiger should be my fellow dwellers, where the sands could not be made the more barren for my fatal tread, nor the fountains more bitter for my desperate and eternal tears. The singular presence of mind found in some men in the midst of universal perturbation—one of the most effective qualities of our nature, and attributed to the highest vigor of heart and understanding—is not always deserving of such proud parentage. It is sometimes the child of mere brute ignorance of danger, sometimes of habitual ferocity; in my instance it was that of madness—the fierce energy that leads the maniac safe over roofs and battlements. All in the Temple was confusion. The priests lay flung at the feet of the altar; or, clinging together in groups of helplessness and dismay, waited speechless for the ruin that was to visit them in this unnatural night. I walked through all, without a fear or a hope under heaven.
Through the solid gloom, and among heaps of men and sacred things cast under my feet, like the spoil of some stormed camp, I made my way to my dwelling, direct and unimpeded, as if I walked in the light of day. I found my wife in deeper terror at my long absence than even at the darkness. She sprang forward at my voice, and, falling on my neck, shed the tears of joy and love. But few words passed between us, for but few were necessary, to bid her with her babe to follow me. She would have followed me to the ends of the earth.
O Miriam, Miriam! how often have I thought of thee, in my long pilgrimage! How often, like that of a spirit descended to minister consolation to the wanderer, have I seen, in my midnight watching, thy countenance of more than woman’s beauty! To me thou hast never died. Thy more than man’s loftiness of soul; thy generous fidelity of love to a wayward and unhappy heart; thy patient treading with me along the path that I had sowed with the thorn and thistle for thy feet, but which should have been covered with the wealth of princes, to be worthy of thy loveliness and thy virtue—all rise in memory, and condemnation, before the chief of sinners. Age after age have I traveled to thy lonely grave; age after age have I wept and prayed upon the dust that was once perfection. In all the hardness forced upon me by a stern world; in all the hatred of mankind that the insolence of the barbarian and the persecutor has bound round my bosom like a mail of iron, I have preserved one source of feeling sacred—a solitary fount to feed the little vegetation of a withered heart: the love of thee; perhaps to be a sign of that regenerate time when the curse shall be withdrawn; perhaps to be in mercy the source from which that more than desert, thy husband’s soul, shall be refreshed, and the barrenness nourish with the flowers of the paradise of God!
Throwing off my robe of priesthood, as I then thought, forever, I went forth, followed by my heroic wife and bearing my child in my arms. I had left behind me sumptuous things, wealth transmitted from a long line of illustrious ancestry. I cared not for them. Wealth a thousand times more precious was within my embrace. Yet, when I touched the threshold, the last sensation of divorce from all that I had been came over my mind. My wife felt the trembling of my frame, and, with a gentle firmness which in the hour of trouble often exalts the fortitude of woman above the headlong and inflamed courage of the warrior, she bade me be of good cheer. I felt her lips on my hand at the moment—the touch gave new energy to my whole being—and I bounded forward into the ocean of darkness.
“All in the Temple was confusion.”
Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.
Without impediment or error, I made my way over and among the crowds that strewed the court of the Gentiles. I heard many a prayer and many a groan; but I had now no more to do with man, and forced my way steadily to the great portal. Thus far, if I had been stricken with utter blindness, I could not have been less guided by the eye. But, on passing into the streets of the lower city, a scattered torch, from time to time, struggling through the darkness, like the lamp in a sepulcher, gave me glimpses of the scene. The broad avenue was encumbered with the living, in the semblance of the dead. All were prostrated or were in those attitudes into which men are thrown by terror beyond the strength or spirit of man to resist. The cloud that, from my melancholy bed above the valley of Hinnom, I had seen rolling up the hills, was this multitude. A spectacle had drawn them all by a cruel, a frantic, curiosity out of Jerusalem, and left it the solitude that had surprised me. Preternatural eclipse and horror fell on them, and their thousands madly rushed back to perish, if perish they must, within the walls of the City of Holiness. Still the multitude came pouring in; their distant trampling had the sound of a cataract, and their outcries of pain, and rage, and terror were like what I have since heard, but more feebly, sent up from the field of battle.
I struggled on, avoiding the living torrent, and slowly treading my way wherever I heard the voices least numerous; but my task was one of extreme toil, and but for those more than the treasures of the earth to me, whose lives depended on my efforts, I should willingly have lain down and suffered the multitude to trample me into the grave. How long I thus struggled I know not. But a yell of peculiar and universal terror that burst round me made me turn my reluctant eyes toward Jerusalem. The cause of this new alarm was seen at once.
A large sphere of fire fiercely shot through the heavens, lighting its track down the murky air, and casting a disastrous and pallid illumination on the myriads of gazers below. It stopped above the city and exploded in thunder, flashing over the whole horizon, but covering the Temple with a blaze which gave it the aspect of a huge mass of metal glowing in the furnace. Every outline of the architecture, every pillar, every pinnacle, was seen with a livid and terrible distinctness. Again, all vanished. I heard the hollow roar of an earthquake; the ground rose and heaved under our feet. I heard the crash of buildings, the fall of fragments of the hills, and, louder than both, the groan of the multitude. I caught my wife and child closer to my bosom. In the next moment I felt the ground give way beneath me, a sulfurous vapor took away my breath, and I was swept into the air in a whirlwind of dust and ashes!
When I recovered my senses, all was so much changed round me that I could scarcely be persuaded that either the past or the present was not a dream. I had no consciousness of any interval between them, more than that of having closed my eyes at one instant, to open them at the next. Yet the curtains of a tent waved round me, in a breeze fragrant with the breath of roses and balsam-trees. Beyond the gardens and meadows, from which those odors sprang, a river shone, like a path of lapis lazuli, in the calm effulgence of the western sun. Tents were pitched, from which I heard the sounds of pastoral instruments; camels were drinking and grazing along the riverside; and turbaned men and maidens were ranging over the fields, or sitting on the banks to enjoy the cool of the delicious evening.
While I tried to collect my senses and discover whether this was more than one of those sports of a wayward fancy which tantalize the bed of the sick mind, I heard a low hymn, and listened to the sounds with breathless anxiety. The voice I knew at once—it was Miriam’s. But in the disorder of my brain, and the strange circumstances which had filled the latter days, in that total feebleness too in which I could not move a limb or utter a word, a persuasion seized me that I was already beyond the final boundary of mortals. All before me was like that paradise from which the crime of our great forefather had driven man into banishment. I remembered the convulsion of the earth in which I had sunk, and asked myself, Could man be wrapped in flame and the whirlwind that tore up mountains like the roots of flowers, and yet live?
In this perplexity I closed my eyes to collect my thoughts, and probably exhibited some strong emotion of countenance, for I was roused by a cry: “He lives! He lives!” I looked up—Miriam stood before me, clasping her lovely hands with the wildness of joy unspeakable, and shedding tears that, large and lustrous, fell down her glowing cheeks like dew upon the pomegranate. She threw herself upon my pillow, kissed my forehead with lips that breathed new life into me; then, pressing my chill hand between hers, knelt down and with a look worthy of that heaven on which it was fixed, radiant with beauty, and holiness, and joy as the face of an angel, offered up her thanksgiving.
The explanation of the scene that perplexed me was given in a few words, interrupted only by tears and sighs of delight. With the burst of the earthquake the supernatural darkness had cleared away. I was flung under the shelter of one of those caves which abound in the gorges of the mountains round Jerusalem. Miriam and her infant were flung by my side, yet unhurt. While I lay insensible in her arms, she, by singular good fortune, found herself surrounded by a troop of our kinsmen returning from the city, where terror had suffered but few to remain. They placed her and her infant on their camels. Me they would have consigned to the sepulcher of the priests; but Miriam was not to be shaken in her purpose to watch over me until all hope was gone. I was thus carried along—and they were now three days on their journey homeward. The landscape before me was Samaria.
My natural destination would have been the cities of the priests[6] which lay to the south, bordering upon Hebron. In those thirteen opulent and noble residences allotted to the higher ministry of the Temple, they enjoyed all that could be offered by the munificent wisdom of the state—wealth that raised them above the pressures of life, yet not so great as to extinguish the desire of intellectual distinction or the love of the loftier virtues. The means of mental cultivation were provided for them with more than royal liberality. Copies of the sacred books, multiplied in every form, and adorned with the finest skill of the pencil and the sculptor in gold and other precious materials, attested at once the reverence of the nation for its law, and the perfection to which it had brought the decorative arts. The works of strangers eminent for genius or knowledge, or even for the singularity of their subject, were not less to be found in those stately treasure-houses of mind. There the priest might relax his spirit from the sublimer studies of his country by the bold and brilliant epics of Greece, the fantastic passion and figured beauty of the Persian poesy, or the alternate severity and sweetness of the Indian drama—that startling union of all lovely images of nature, the bloom and fragrance of flowers, the hues of the Oriental heaven, and the perfumes of isles of spice and cinnamon, with the grim and subterranean terrors of a gigantic idolatry. There he might spread the philosophic wing from the glittering creations of Grecian metaphysics, to their dark and early oracles in the East; or, stopping in his central flight, plunge into the profound of Egyptian mystery, where science lies, like the mummy, wrapped in a thousand folds that preserve the form, but preserve it with the living principle gone.
Music, of all pleasures the most intellectual, that glorious painting to the ear, that rich mastery of the gloomier emotions of our nature, was studied by the priesthood with a skill that influenced the habits of the country. How often have my fiercest perturbations sunk at the sounds that once filled the breezes of Judea! How often, when my brain was burning and the blood ran through my veins like molten brass, have I been softened down to painless tears by the chorus from our hills, the mellow harmonies of harp and horn blending with the voices of the youths and maidens of Israel! How often have I in the night listened, while the chant, ascending with a native richness to which the skill of other nations was dissonance, floated upward like a cloud of incense, bearing the aspirations of holiness and gratitude to the throne of Him whom man hath not seen nor can see!
But those times are sunk deep in the great gulf that absorbs the happiness and genius of man. I have since traversed my country in its length and breadth; I have marked with my weary feet every valley, and made my restless bed upon every hill from Idumea to Lebanon, and from the Assyrian sands to the waters of the Mediterranean; yet the harp and voice were dead. I heard sounds on the hills, but they were the cries of the villagers flying before some tyrant gatherer of a tyrant’s tribute. I heard sounds in the midnight, but they were the howl of the wolf and the yell of the hyena reveling over the naked and dishonored graves, which the infidel had given, in his scorn, to the people of my fathers.
But the study to which the largest expenditure of wealth and labor was devoted was, as it ought to be, that of the sacred books of Israel. It only makes me rebellious against the decrees of fate to think of the incomparable richness and immaculate character of the volumes over which I have so often hung, and look upon the diminished and degraded exterior in which their wisdom now lies before man. Where are now the cases covered with jewels, the clasps of topaz and diamond; the golden arks in which the volume of the hope of Israel lay, too precious not to be humiliated by the contact with even the richest treasure of earth? Where are the tissued curtains, which hid, as in a sanctuary, that mighty roll, too sacred to be glanced on by the casual eye? But, the spoiler—the spoiler! The Arab, the Parthian, the human tiger of the north, that lies crouching for a thousand years in the sheepfold of Judah! Is there not a sword? Is there not a judgment? Terribly will it judge the oppressor.
The home of my kinsmen was in the allotment of Naphtali. The original tribe had revolted in the general schism of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and was swept into the Assyrian captivity. But on the restoration by Cyrus, fragments of all the captive tribes returned and were suffered to resume their lands. Misfortune wrought its moral on them; the chief families pledged their allegiance once more to Judah, and were exemplary in paying homage to the spirit and ordinances of their religion.
We hastened through Samaria. The rancorous enmity borne by the Samaritans to the subjects of Judah, for ages made all intercourse between Jerusalem and the north difficult. It was often totally interrupted by war; it was dangerous in peace, and the ferocious character of the population and the bitter antipathy of the government made it to the Jew a land of robbers.[7] But among the evils of the Roman conquest was mingled this good, that it suffered no subordinate tyranny. Its sword cut away at a blow all those minor oppressions which make the misery of provincial life. If the mountain robber invaded the plain, as was his custom of old, the Roman cavalry were instantly on him with the spear, until he took refuge in the mountains; if he resisted in his native fastnesses, the legionaries pursued him with torch and sword, stifled him if he remained in his cave, or stabbed him at its entrance. If quarrels arose between villages, the cohorts burned them to the ground; and the execution was done with a promptitude and completeness that less resembled the ordinary operations of war than the work of superhuman power. The Roman knowledge of our disturbances was instantaneous. Signals established on the hills conveyed intelligence with the speed of light, from the remotest corners of the land to their principal stations. Even in our subsequent conspiracies, the first knowledge that they had broken out was often conveyed to their partizans in the next district by the movement of the Roman troops. Well had they chosen the eagle for their ensign. They rushed with the eagle’s rapidity on their victim; and when it was stretched in blood they left the spot of vengeance, as if they had left it on the wing. Their advance had the rapidity of the most hurried retreat and the steadiness of the most secure triumph. Their retreat left nothing behind but the marks of their irresistible power.
All the armies of the earth have since passed before me. I have seen the equals of the legions in courage and discipline, and their superiors in those arms by which human life is at the caprice of ambition. But their equals I have never seen, in the individual fitness of the soldier for war; in his fleetness, muscular vigor, and expertness in the use of his weapons; in his quick adaptation to all the multiplied purposes of the ancient campaign—from the digging of a trench or the management of a catapult to the assault of a citadel; in his iron endurance of the vicissitudes of climate; in the length and regularity of his marches; or in the rapidity, boldness, and dexterity of his maneuver in the field. Yet it is but a melancholy tribute to the valor of my countrymen to record the Roman acknowledgment, that of all the nations conquered by Rome Judea bore the chain with the haughtiest dignity, and most frequently and fiercely contested the supremacy of the sword.
Under that stern supremacy, the Samaritan had long rested and flourished in exemption from the harassing cruelty of petty war. We now passed with our long caravan unguarded, and moved at will through fields rich with the luxuriance of an Eastern summer, where our fathers would have scarcely ventured but with an army. I made no resistance to being thus led away to a region so remote from my own. To have returned to the cities of the priests would have but given me unceasing agony. Even the gates of Jerusalem were to my feelings anathema. The whole fabric of my mind had undergone a revolution. Like a man tossed at the mercy of the tempest, I sought but a shore—and all shores were alike to him who must be an exile forever.
The country through which we passed, after leaving the boundaries of Samaria—where, with all its peace, no Jew could tread but as in the land of strangers—was new to me. My life had been till now spent in study or in serving the altar; and I had heard, with the usual and unwise indifference of men devoted to books, the praise of the picturesque and stately provinces that still remained to our people. I was now to see for myself, and was often compelled, as we advanced, to reproach the idle prejudice that had so long deprived me, and might forever deprive so many of my consecrated brethren, of an enjoyment cheering to the human heart and full of lofty and hallowed memory to the men of Israel. As we passed along, less traveling than wandering at pleasure, through regions where every winding of the marble hill or descent of the fruitful valley showed us some sudden and romantic beauty of landscape, my kinsmen took a natural pride in pointing out the noble features that made Canaan a living history of Providence.[8]
What were even the trophy-covered hills of Greece or the monumental plains of Italy to the hills and plains where the memorial told of the miracles and the presence of the Supreme? “Look to that rock,” they would exclaim; “there descended the angel of the Presence! On the summit of that cloudy ridge stood Ezekiel, when he saw the vision of the latter days. Look to yonder cleft in the mountains; there fell the lightning from heaven on the Philistine.” In our travel we reached a valley, a spot of singular beauty and seclusion, blushing with flowers and sheeted with the olive from its edge down to a stream that rushed brightly through its bosom. There was no dwelling of man in it, but on a gentler slope of the declivity stood a gigantic terebinth-tree. More than curiosity was attracted to this delicious spot, for the laughter and talk of the caravan had instantly subsided at the sight. All, by a common impulse, dismounted from their horses and camels; and though it was still far from sunset, the tents were pitched and preparations made for prayer. The spot reminded me of the valley of Hebron, sacred to the Jewish heart as the burial-place of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac. May they sleep in the bosom of the Lord! The terebinth-tree, under which the greatest of the patriarchs sat and talked with the angels—the fountain—the cave of Macpelah, in which his mortal frame returned to the earth, to come again in glory, appeared to lie before me.
From the day of my unspeakable crime, I had never joined in prayer with my people. Yet, I was still a believer in the faith of Israel. I even clung to it with the nervous violence of one who, in a shipwreck, feels that his only hope is the plank in his grasp, and that some more powerful hand is tearing even that plank away. But the sight of human beings enjoying the placid consolations of prayer had from the first moment overwhelmed me with so keen a sense of my misfortune—the pious gentleness of attitude and voice, the calm uplifted hand, and low and solemn aspiration were in so deep a contrast to the involuntary wildness and broken utterings of a heart bound in more than adamantine chains, that I shrank from the rebuke and groaned in solitude.
I went forth into the valley, and was soon lost in its thick vegetation. The sound of the hymn that sank down in mingled sweetness with the murmuring of the evening air through the leaves, and the bubbling of the brook below, alone told me that I was near human beings. I sat upon a fragment of turf, embroidered as never was kingly footstool and with my hands clasped over my eyes, to remove from me all the images of life, gave way to that visionary mood of mind in which ideas come and pass in crowds without shape, leaving no more impression than the drops of a sun-shower on the trees. I had remained long in this half-dreaming confusion, and had almost imagined myself transported to some intermediate realm of being, where a part of the infliction was that of being startled by keen flashes of light from some upper world, when I was roused by the voice of Eleazar, the brother of Miriam, at my side. His manly and generous countenance expressed mingled anxiety and gladness at discovering me. “The whole camp,” said he, “have been alarmed at your absence, and have searched for these three hours through every part of our day’s journey. Miriam’s distraction at length urged me to leave her, and it was by her instinct that I took my way down the only path hitherto unsearched, and where, indeed, from fear or reverence of the place, few but myself would have willingly come.” He called to an attendant, and, sending him up the side of the valley with the tidings, we followed slowly, for I was still feeble. As we emerged into a more open space, the moon lying on masses of cloud, like a queen pillowed on couches of silver, showed me, in her strong illumination of the forest, the flashes which had added to the bewildered pain of my reverie. While I talked with natural animation of the splendor of the heavens, and pointed out the lines and figures on the moon’s disk, which made it probable that it was, like earth, a place of habitation, he suddenly pressed my hand, and stopping, with his eyes fixed on my face: “How,” said he, “does it happen, my friend, my brother Salathiel?” I started, as if my name, the name of my illustrious ancestor, direct in descent from the father of the faithful, were an accusation. He proceeded, with an ardent pressure of my quivering hand: “How is it to be accounted for that you, with such contemplations and the knowledge that gives them the dignity of science, can yet be so habitually given over to gloom? Serious crime I will not believe in you, though the best of us are stained. But your character is pure; I know your nature to be too lofty for the degenerate indulgence of the passions, and Miriam’s love for you, a love passing that of women, is in itself a seal of virtue. Answer me, Can the wealth, power, or influence of your brother and his house, nay of his tribe, assist you?”