I heard my name pronounced! I listened; the name of my wife followed. I looked to the sky, to the forest, to convince me that this was no mockery of the diseased mind. I was fully awake. I lifted up the corner of the tent. Savage figures were sitting over their cups, inflamed into quarrel; and, in the midst of high words and execrations, I heard their story. They were robbers from Mount Amanus,[22] come equally to purify their hands by offering sacrifice at Lebanon, and to recompense themselves for their lost time by robbing on the way home. The quarrel had arisen from the proposal of one of them to extend their expedition into Judea, a proposal which he sustained by mentioning the success of his previous enterprises. My name was again sent from mouth to mouth, and I found that it was inscribed on some jewel which formed a part of his plunder. The thought struck me that this might afford a clue. I burst into the tent and demanded tidings of my wife and children. The ruffians started, as if in the presence of a specter.

“Where,” I repeated, “are my family? I am Salathiel!”

“Safe enough,” said the foremost.

“Are they alive?” I cried; “lead me where they are, and you shall have whatever ransom you desire.”

The ruffian laughed. “Why, as for ransom, all the money has been made by them that is likely to be made for some time, unless the Greek that bought them repents of his bargain.”

The speech was received with loud laughter. I grew furious.

“Villains, you have murdered them. Tell me the whole—show me where they lie, or I will deliver you up to the chief of the caravan as robbers and murderers.”

They were appalled; with a single stride I was at the throat of the leading ruffian, and seized the jewel; it was my bridal present to Miriam! My hand trembled, my eyes grew dim at the glance. But in the next moment I found myself pinioned, a gag forced into my mouth, a cloak flung over me, and I heard the discussion—whether I was to be stabbed on the spot, left to die of famine, or have my tongue cut out, and thus unfitted for telling secrets, be turned to gain and sold for a slave.

But this was not to be my lot. The quarrel of the banditti increased with their wine; blows were given; the solitary lamp was thrown down in the conflict; it caught some combustible matter, and the tent was in a blaze. By a violent exertion I loosened the cords from my arms, and in the confusion fled unseen. The fire spread, and my last glance at the valley showed the encampment turned into a sheet of fire. Alone, and exhausted with deadly fatigue, I yet had but one thought, that of seeking my family through the world. I wandered on through the vast range of wild country that guards Syria on the side of the desert. I was parched by the burning noon, I was frozen by the keen winds of night; I hungered and thirsted, yet the determination was strong as death, and I persevered. I at length reached the foot of Mount Amanus, traversed the chain, saw from it the interminable plains of Asia Minor, the desert of Aleppo, the shores of Tripoli, and was then left only to choose in which I should again commence my hopeless pilgrimage.

There is something in great distress of mind that throws a strange protection round the sufferer. I passed the Roman guards unquestioned—the robber left me without inquiring whether I was worth his dagger. The wolves, driven down by famine, and devouring all else that had life, neglected the banquet that I might have supplied. Yet I shrank from nothing, and marched on through city, cave and forest. But one evening the sky was loaded with a tempest that drove even me to seek for shelter. I found it in one of the caverns, that so often scare the mariner’s eye, on the iron-bound shore of Cilicia.

Fatigue soon threw me into a heavy slumber. The weight of the tempest toward midnight roused me, and from the mouth of the cavern I gazed on the lightning that disclosed at every explosion the sea rolling in foaming ridges before the gale. In the intervals of the gusts I heard, to my surprise, the murmur of many voices, apparently in prayer, close beside me. But all my interest was suddenly fixed on the sea by the sight of a large war-galley running before the wind. She had neither sail nor oar. Her masts were gone and but for the crowd of people on her deck, whose distracted attitudes I could clearly see by the flashes, she looked a floating tomb.

To warn the galley of the nearness of the shore, I gathered the brushwood beside me, and set it on fire. A shout from the crew told that my signal was understood, and I rushed down the bed of a stream that fretted its way through the precipice. Before I reached the shore, I saw various fires blazing above, and many figures hurrying down on a purpose like my own. We had not arrived too soon. The galley, after desperate efforts to keep the sea, had run for an inlet of the rocks and was embayed; surge on surge, each higher than the one before, now rolled over the ill-fated vessel, and each swept some portion of her crew into the deep. We rushed into the waves and had succeeded in drawing many to shore when a broader burst, the concentrated force of the tempest, thundered on the galley; she was broken into splinters. Stunned and half-suffocated with the surge, I grasped, in the mere instinct of self-preservation, at whatever was nearest and, through infinite hazard, reached the shore with a body in my arms. Need I tell my terror, anxiety, hope, and joy when I found that this being, whom I saw at length breathing, moving, pronouncing my name, falling on my neck, was Miriam!

My daughters, too, were rescued. The nearness of the shore saved the crew, who, until they saw the fire on the rocks, had given themselves up to despair. The chance of help led them to steer close inland, and I was congratulated as the general preserver. Miriam’s story was brief. Our dwelling had been surrounded by a troop of robbers. The household were surprised in their sleep. Resistance was vain; the rest was plunder and captivity. The robbers, fearful of pursuit, took the road to the mountains at full speed. My wife and daughters were treated with unusual care, lest their beauty should be injured, and thus their value in the slave-market of Tripoli impaired. As the robber told me, they had been purchased by a merchant of Cyprus, and by him conveyed to his island to be sold to some more opulent master. There they were redeemed by an act of equal generosity and valor, and were returning to Judea when they were overtaken by the storm.

CHAPTER XV
The Appeal of Miriam

When the first tumult of our spirits was passed, I had leisure to see what changes the interval had made in faces so loved. Miriam’s betrayed the hours of distress and pain that she must have passed through, but her noble style of beauty, the emanation of a noble mind, was as conspicuous as ever. I even thought, when her eyes met mine from time to time, that they shone with a loftier intelligence, as if misfortune had raised their vision above the things of our trivial world. My daughters’ forms had matured, but Salome, the elder, had to a certain degree her mother’s look; her glance was bright, yet she was often lost in meditation, and the rapid changes of her cheek from the deepest crimson to the whiteness of the snow alarmed me with menaces of early decay. Esther, too, had undergone her revolution. But it was of the brightest texture. The seas, the skies, the mountains of Greece, filled her glowing spirit with images of new life. She had listened with boundless delight to the traditions of that most brilliant of all people; the works of the pencil and the chisel had met her eye in a profuseness and perfection that she had never contemplated before; her harp had echoed to names of romantic valor and proud patriotism; and as I gazed on her in those hours when in the feeling that she was unobserved she gave way to the rich impulses of her soul, I thought alternately of the prophetess and of the muse.

The shipwreck converted the solitary shore into a little village; the sailors collected the fragments of the vessel and formed them into huts; the caves that ran along the level of the sands supplied habitations in themselves, and by the assistance of those dwellers on the precipice, who had so unexpectedly started to light, the first difficulties of a wild coast were sufficiently combated. The bustling activity of the Greek mariners and the adroitness with which they availed themselves of all contrivances for passing the heavy hour, their sleights-of-hand, sports and dances, their recitations of popular poems, and their boat-songs, kept the spot in continual animation.

This was my first contact with the actual people, and I acknowledged their right to have been distinguished among the most showy disturbers of mankind. The evil of the character too was displayed without much trouble of disguise. They habitually gamed till they had no better stake than the fragments of their own clothing; but they would game for a shell, for a stone that they picked up on the sands, for anything. They quarreled with as perfect facility as they gamed; the knife was out quick as lightning, but to do them justice their wrath was as brief. The combatants embraced at a word, danced, kissed, and wept; then drank, gamed, quarreled, and were sworn brothers again. But this was Greece in its lowest rank.

Constantius, the commander of the galley, was a specimen of the land which produced a Plato and a Pericles. When I first saw him led to me by Miriam as the champion who had restored her and her children to happiness, I saw virtue and manliness of the highest order in his features. He was in his prime, but a scar across his forehead and the severities of martial life had given early seriousness to his countenance. But his conversation had the full spirit of the spring-time of life. It was incomparably various and animated, altogether free from professional pedantry; it had the interest that belongs to professional feelings. Military adventure, striking traits of warlike intelligence, the composition of the fleets and armies of the various states that fought under the wing of the Roman eagle, were topics on which his fire was exhaustless. On those I listened to him with the strong sympathy of one to whom war must henceforth be the grand pursuit; war for national freedom—war purified of its evil by the most illustrious cause that ever unsheathed the sword.

He had conversation for us all. His intercourse with the ruling lands of the earth gave him a copious store of recollections, picturesque and strange. Esther combated and questioned the traveler. Salome listened to the warrior—listened and loved. He had higher topics of which I was yet to hear. In the inhabitants of the precipice he found a little colony of his countrymen, fugitive Christians driven out by persecution, to make their home in the wilderness of nature.[23] The long range of caverns which perforated the rock gave them a roof. The fertility of the soil, and the occasional visit of a bark sent by their concealed friends, supplied the necessaries of life, and there they awaited the close of that ferocious tyranny which at length roused the world against Nero—or awaited the end of all suffering in the grave. A succession of storms rendered traveling impossible and detained us among those hermits for some days. I found them intelligent and, in general, men of the higher ranks of knowledge and condition. Some were of celebrated families, and had left behind them opulence and authority. A few were peasants. But misfortune and, still more, principle, extinguished all that was abrupt in the inequality of ranks without leaving license in its stead. Jew as I was, and steadily bound to the customs of my country, I yet did honor to the patience, the humility, and the devotedness of those exiled men. I even once attended their worship on the first day of the week, assured that the abomination of idols was not to be found there, and that I should hear nothing insulting to the name of Israel.

The ceremonial was simple. Those who had witnessed the heaven-commanded magnificence of the Temple might smile at the bareness of walls of rock, figured only with the wild herbage; or those who had seen the extravagant and complicated rites of paganism might scorn the few and obvious forms of the homage. But there was the spirit of strong prayer, the breathing of the heart, the unanswerable sincerity. Every violence of the mere animal frame was unknown. I saw no pagan convulsion, no fierceness of outcry and gesture, not even the vehement solemnity of the Jew. All was calm; tears stole down, but they stole in silence; knees were bowed, but there was no prostration; prayers fervent and lofty were poured forth, but they were in accents uttered less from the lip than from the soul—appeals of hallowed confidence, as to a Being who was sure to hear the voice of children to a Father who, wherever two or three were gathered together, was in the midst of them.

At length the storms cleared away and the sky wore the native azure of the climate. A messenger despatched to Cyprus returned with a vessel for the embarkation of the Greeks. Camels and mules were procured from the neighboring country for our journey, and the morning was fixed on which we were to separate. Yet with so much reason for joy, few resolutions could have been received with less favor. Constantius almost shunned society or shared in it with a silence and depression that made his philosophy more than questionable. Miriam was engaged in long conferences with Salome, from which they both came away much saddened. Esther was thus my chief companion, and she talked of the shore, the sea, and even of the tempests, with heightened interest. The Greeks, sailor and soldier alike, loved too well the romantic ease and careless adventure of the place to look with complacency on the little vessel in which they were to be borne once more into the land of restraint. The fugitive colony were not the slowest in their regrets. They had been deeply prepared for human vicissitudes, and had humbled themselves to all things; yet such is the strong and natural connection of man with man that they lamented the solitude to which they must again be left, like the commencement of a new exile.

There are few things more singular than the blindness which, in matters of the highest importance to ourselves, often hides the truth that is as plain as noon to all other eyes. The cause which had deprived Constantius of his eloquence and Salome of her animation was obvious to every one but me. Nor was the mystery yet to be disclosed to my tardy knowledge. I had strayed through the cliffs, as was my custom after the heat of the day, and was taking a last look at the sea from the edge of the precipice. The sands far below me were covered with preparations for the voyage, which, like our journey, was to commence with the rising sun. The little vessel lay, a glittering toy, at anchor with her thread-like streamers playing in the breeze. The sailors were fishing, preparing their evening meal, heaving water and provisions down the rocks, or enjoying themselves over flagons of Syrian wine round their fires. All was the activity of a seaport, but from the height on which I stood, all was but the activity of a mole-hill.

“And is it of such materials,” mused I, “that ambition is made? Is it to command, to be gazed on, to be shouted after by such mites and atoms as those, that life is exhausted in watching and weariness; that our true enjoyments are sacrificed; that the present and the future are equally cast from us; that the hand is dipped in blood and the earth desolated? What must Alexander’s triumph have looked to one who saw it from the towers of Babylon? A triumph of emmets!” I smiled at the moral of three hundred feet of precipice.

A step beside me put my philosophy to flight. My wife stood there, and never saw I her beauty more beautiful. The exertion of the ascent had colored her cheek; the breeze had scattered her raven locks across a forehead of the purest white; her lips wore the smile so long absent, and there was altogether an air of hope and joy in her countenance that made me instinctively ask of what good news she was the bearer. Without a word, she sat down beside me and pressed my hand; she fixed her eyes on mine, tried to speak, and failing, fell on my neck and burst into tears. Alarmed by her sobs and the wild beating of her heart, I was about to rise for assistance when she detained me, and the smile returned; she bared her forehead to the breeze, and recovering, disburdened her soul.

“How many billows,” said she, gazing on the sea, “will roll between that little bark and this shore to-morrow! There is always something melancholy in parting. Yet if that vessel could feel, with what delight would she not wing her way to Cyprus, lovely Cyprus!”

I was surprised. “Miriam! this from you? Can you regret the place of paganism—the land of your captivity?”

“No,” was the answer, with a look of lofty truth; “I abhorred the guilty profanations of the pagan; and who can love the dungeon? Even were Cyprus a paradise, I should have felt unhappy in the separation from my country and from you. Yet those alone who have seen the matchless loveliness of the island—the perpetual animation of life in a climate and in the midst of scenes made for happiness—can know the sacrifice that must be made by its people in leaving it, and leaving it perhaps forever.”

“The crew of that galley are not to be tried by long exile. In two days at furthest, they will anchor in their own harbour,” was my only answer.

“And how deeply must the sacrifice be enhanced by the abandonment of rank, wealth, professional honors!—and this is the sacrifice on which I have been sent to consult my husband.”

I was totally at a loss to conceive of whom she spoke.

“Our friend—our deliverer from captivity or death—the generous being who, through infinite hazards, restored your wife and children to happiness and home——”

“Constantius? Impossible! At the very age of ambition, with his talents, his knowledge of life, his prospects of distinction!”

“Constantius will never return to Cyprus in that galley—will never draw sword for Rome again—will never quit the land given by Heaven to our fathers, if such be the will of Salathiel.”

“Strange. But his motives? He is superior to the fickleness that abandons an honorable course of life through the pure love of novelty—or is he weary of the absurdities of paganism?”

“Thoroughly weary—more than weary: he has abjured them forever and ever.”

“You rejoice me. But it was to be expected from his manly mind. You have brought an illustrious convert, my beloved! and if your captivity has done this, it was the will of Heaven. Constantius shall be led with distinction to the Temple and be one of ourselves. Judea may yet require such men. Our holy religion may exult in such conquests from the darkness of the idolatrous world.”

The voice of the hermits at their evening prayer now arose and held us in a silence which neither seemed inclined to break. Many thoughts pressed on my mind: the addition to our circle of a man whom I honored and esteemed; the accession of a practised soldier to our cause; the near approach of the hour of conflict; the precarious fate of those I loved in the great convulsion which was to rend away the Roman yoke or leave Judea a tomb. I accidentally looked up and saw that Miriam had been as abstracted as myself. But war and policy were not in the contemplations of the beaming countenance; nor their words on the lips that quivered and crimsoned before me. Her eyes were fixed on the sky, and she was in evident prayer, which I desired not to disturb.

She at length caught my glance and blushed like one detected; but quickly recovering, said in a tone never to be forgotten: “My husband! my lord! my love! would that I dared open my whole spirit to you! would that you could read for yourself the truths written in my heart!”

“Miriam!”

“This is no reproach. But I know your strength of opinion—your passion for all that concerns the glory of Israel; your right, the right of talents and character to the foremost rank among the priesthood—and those things repel me.”

“Speak out at once. We can have no concealments, Miriam; candor, candor in all things.”

“You have heard the prayers of those exiles; you acknowledge their acquirements and understandings; they have sacrificed much, everything—friends, country, the world. Can such men have been imposed on? Can they have imposed on themselves? Is it possible that their sacrifices could have been made for a fiction?”

“Perhaps not; the question is difficult. We are strangely the slaves of impulse. Men every day abandon the most obvious good for the most palpable follies. Enthusiasm is a minor madness.”

“But are those exiles enthusiasts? They are grave men, experienced in life; their language is totally free from extravagance; they reason with singular clearness; they live with the most striking command over the habits of their original condition. Greeks as they are, you see no haste of temper, you hear no violence of language among them. Once idolaters, they shrink from the thought of idols. Now fugitive and persecuted, they pray for their persecutors. Sharing the lair of wild beasts, and driven out from all that they knew and loved, they utter no complaint—they even rejoice in their calamity and offer up praises to the mercy that shut the gates of earth upon their steps, only to open the gates of heaven.”

“I am no persecutor, Miriam. Nay, I honor the self-denial, as I doubt not the sincerity of those men. But if they have thrown off a portion of their early blindness, why not desire the full illumination? Why linger half-way between falsehood and truth? It is not, as you know, our custom to solicit proselytes. But such men might be not unworthy of the hope of Israel.”

“It is to the hope of Israel that they have come, that they cling, that they look up for a recompense—a glorious recompense for their sufferings.”

“Let them then join us at sunrise, and come to our holy city.”

“Salathiel, the time is declared when men shall worship not in that mountain alone, but through all lands; when the yoke of our law shall be lightened and the weary shall have rest; when the altar shall pass away as the illustrious victim has passed, and the wisdom of heaven shall be the possession of all mankind.”

I looked at her in astonishment. “Miriam, this from you! from a daughter of the blood of Jacob! from the wife of a servant of the Temple! Have you become a Christian?”

“I have done nothing in presumption. I have prayed to the Source of light that He would enlighten my understanding; I have, night and day, examined the law and the prophets. Bear with my weakness, Salathiel, if it be proved weakness. But if it be wisdom, knowledge, and truth, I implore you by our love, nay, by the higher interests of your own soul, follow my example.”

It was impossible to answer harshly to a remonstrance expressed with the overflowing fondness of the heart: I could only remind her of the unchangeable promises made to Judaism.

“But it is of those promises I speak,” urged she; “we have seen the day that our father Abraham longed to see; that mighty Being, the Lord of eternity, the express image of the glory of the Invisible, the hope of the patriarch, the promise of the prophet, has come.”

I was alarmed.

“Yet Israel is divided and enslaved, torn by capricious tyranny, and hurrying to the common ruin of doomed nations. Is this the triumphant kingdom of prophecy?”

“Salathiel, I have doubted like you; but I have been at length convinced out of the mouths of the prophets themselves. Have they not declared that Israel should suffer before it triumphed, and suffer too for a period that strikes the mind with terror? that the King of Israel should be excluded from his kingdom—nay, take upon him the form of a servant—nay, die, and die by a death of pain and shame the death of a slave and criminal?”

“It is so written. But it is beyond our power to reconcile.”

“Pray then for the power, and it will be given to you. Ask for the spirit of holy intelligence, and it will enlighten you. Pride is the crime of our nation. Humility would take the veil from the eyes of our people. Salathiel, my lord, the being treasured in my heart! read the Scriptures. I have prayed for you. Read——”

“But how can the promise of the kingdom be denied? It is the theme first, last, and without end of all the inspired masters of Israel. What splendor and reality of history was ever more vivid and real than the glorious promises of Isaiah?” I murmured.

“Yet what force and minuteness of picturing ever excelled Isaiah’s description of the lowliness, the obscurity, the rejection, the agonies, and the death of the Messiah? Why shall we suppose that the one description is true and the other false? Has not the same inspiration given both? Why shall we conceive that the Messiah and His kingdom must appear together? We see the time of His first coming defined to a year, by our great prophet Daniel. But where do we see the time of the triumphant kingdom defined? Why may it not follow at a distance of ages? We know that we shall stand at the latter day upon the earth and in our flesh shall see God. Why shall not the triumph be reserved for that day of glory? Are our people now fit to be a nation of kings? Or are the best of us, in the mortal feebleness of our nature, fit to share in a triumph in which angels are to minister? fit dwellers of a city from which error and evil are to be excluded; in which there is to be no tear, no human suffering, no remembered bitterness; ‘a city whose builder and maker is God’; within whose walls live holiness, power, and virtue; on whose throne sits the Omnipotent!”

Sensations to which I dared not give utterance oppressed me; my crime, my fate, rose up before the mental eye. I had no answer for this admirable woman. Her pure zeal and her holiness of heart touched me deeply. But let no man blame my stubbornness until he has weighed the influence of feelings, born in a people, strengthened by their history, reenforced by miracle, and authenticated by the words of inspiration. That Judaism was purity itself to the worship and morals of the pagan world, that it was the continued object of a particular Providence, that it alone possessed the revelations of God, were facts that defied doubt. And that those high distinctions should be made void, and the slavish mind of paganism be admitted into our privileges—still more, that it should be admitted to the exclusion of the chosen line—seemed to me a conclusion that no reasoning could substantiate; a fantastic and airy fiction to which no reasoning could be applied.

The moon ascended in serenity, and her orb, slightly tinged by the many-colored clouds that lay upon the horizon, threw a faint silver upon the precipice. The sounds below were hushed; the moving figures, the vessel, the sea, the cliffs, were totally veiled in purple mist. We could not have been more alone if we had been seated on a cloud, and the beauty, the exalted gesture, and the glowing wisdom of the being before me were like those that we conceive of spirits delegated to lead the disembodied mind upward from world to world. A sea-bird winging its way above our heads broke the reverie. I reminded my teacher that it grew late and our absence might produce anxiety.

“Salathiel,” said she, with mingled fervor and softness, “you know I love you; never was heart more fondly bound to another than is mine to you. I am grateful for your permission to receive Constantius into our tribe. But one obligation, infinitely dearer, you can confer on me—read this scroll.” She drew from her bosom a letter, written to his church by one of the Christian leaders in Asia. “I desire not to offend your convictions, nor to hasten you into a rash adoption of those of others. But in this scroll you will find philosophy without its pride, and knowledge without its guile; you will find, furthermore, the disclosure of those mysteries which have so long perplexed our people. Read, and may He who can bring wisdom out of the lips of babes, and make the wisdom of the wise foolishness, shed His light upon the generous heart of my husband!”

At another time I might have started in horror from this avowal of her faith. But the scene, the circumstances, an unaccountable internal impression—a voice of the soul, prohibited me. I took her trembling hand, and without a word led her down to our dwelling.

CHAPTER XVI
The Heart of Salome

No tidings sooner make themselves known than those of the heart. We found our daughters waiting anxiously at the entrance of the cave, which had been fitted up for our temporary shelter. Before a word could be exchanged, a glance from Miriam told the success of her mission, and anxiety was turned into delight. Esther danced round me and was eloquent in her gratitude. Salome shed silent tears, and when I attempted to wipe them away, fell fainting into my arms. We spent a part of the night in the open air; the last wine and fruits of our store were brought out; the Cypriot exiles came down from their rocks; the crew of the galley, already on board, danced, sang, and drank to the success of the voyage; and it was not till the moon, our only lamp, was about to be extinguished in the waters, that we thought of closing our final night on the Syrian shore.

We traveled along the coast as far as Berytus; then turning to the eastward, crossed the Libanus and the mountain country that branches into Upper Galilee. Our coming had been long announced, and we found Eleazar, Jubal, and our chief kinsmen waiting at one of the passes to lead us home in triumph. The joy of our tribe was honest if it was tumultuous, and many a shout disturbed the solitude as we moved along. My impatience increased when we reached the well-known hills that sheltered what was once my home. Yet I remembered too keenly the shock of seeing its desolation not to dread the first sight of the spot, and rode away from the group at full speed that my nervousness might have time to subside before their arrival. But at the foot of the last ascent I drew the rein. Every tree, every bush, almost every stone, had been familiar to me in my wanderings, and were now painful memorials of the long malady of my mind.

Eleazar, who watched me during the latter part of the journey with something of a consciousness of my thoughts, put spurs to his horse, and found me standing, pale and palpitating.

“Come,” said he, “we must not alarm Miriam by thinking too much of the past; let us try if the top of the hill will not give us a better prospect than the bottom.”

I shrank from the attempt.

“No!” said I; “the horror that the prospect once gave me must not be renewed. Let us change the route, no matter how far round; the sight of that ruin would distract me to the last hour of my life.”

He only smiled in reply, and catching my bridle, galloped forward. A few seconds placed us on the summit of the hill. Could I believe my eyes! All below was as if rapine had never been there. The gardens, the cattle, the dwellings, lay a living picture under the eye.

“This is miracle!” I exclaimed.

“No; or it is but the miracle of a little activity and a great deal of good will,” was the answer of my companion. “Your kinsmen did this at the time when you were slumbering with the wolf and bear in the Libanus; Nature did her part in covering your fields and gardens; and those sheep and cattle are a tribute of gratitude from your brother for the preservation of his life.”

Our troop now ascended the height. The land lay beneath them in the luxuriance of summer. They were ardent in their expressions of surprise and pleasure. We rushed down the defile, and I was once more master of a home. Public events had rapidly ripened in my absence.[24] Popular wrath was stimulated by increased exaction. Law was more palpably perverted into insolence. Order was giving way on all sides. The Roman garrisons, neglected and ill paid, were adopting the desperate habits of the populace, and in the general scorn of religion and right, the country was becoming a horde of robbers. The ultimate causes of this singular degeneracy might be remote and set in action by a vengeance above man; but the immediate causes were plain to every eye.

The general principles of Rome in the government of her conquests were manly and wise. When the soldier had done his work—and it was done vigorously, yet with but little violence beyond that which was essential for complete subjugation—the sword slept as an instrument of evil, and awoke only as an instrument of justice.

If neighboring kingdoms quarreled, a legion marched across the border and brought the belligerents to sudden reason; dismissed their armies to their hearths and altars, and sent the angry chiefs to reconcile their claims in an Italian dungeon. If a disputed succession threatened to embroil the general peace, the proconsul ordered the royal competitors to embark for Rome, and there settle the right before the senate.

The barbaric invasions which had periodically ravaged the Eastern empires even in their day of power were repelled with a terrible vigor. The legions left the desert covered with the tribe for the feast of the vulture, and showed to Europe the haughty leaders of the Tatar, Gothic, and Arab myriads in fetters, dragging wains, digging in mines, or sweeping the highways.

If peace could be an equivalent for freedom, the equivalent was never so amply secured. The world within this iron boundary nourished; the activity and talent of man were urged to the highest pitch; the conquered countries were turned from wastes and forests into fertility; ports were dug upon naked shores; cities swelled from villages; population spread over the soil once pestilential and breeding only the weed and the serpent. The sea was covered with trade; the pirate and the marauder were unheard of or hunted down. Commercial enterprise shot its lines and communications over the map of the earth, and regions were then familiar which even the activity of the revived ages of Europe has scarcely made known.

Those were the wonders of great power steadily directed to a great purpose. General coercion was the simple principle, and the only talisman of a Roman Emperor was the chain, except where it was casually commuted for the sword; the universality of the compression atoned for half its evil. The natural impulse of man is to improvement; he requires only security from rapine. The Roman supremacy raised round him an impregnable wall. It was the true government for an era when the habits of reason had not penetrated the general human mind. Its chief evil was in its restraint of those nobler and loftier aspirations of genius and the heart which from time to time raise the general scale of mankind.

Nothing is more observable than the decay of original literature, of the finer architecture and of philosophical invention, under the empire. Even military genius, the natural product of a system that lived but on military fame, disappeared; the brilliant diversity of warlike talent that shone on the very verge of the succession of the Cæsars sank like falling stars, to rise no more. No captain was again to display the splendid conception of Pompey’s boundless campaigns; the lavish heroism and inexhaustible resource of Antony; or the mixture of undaunted personal enterprise and profound tactic, the statesmanlike thought, generous ambition, and high-minded pride that made Cæsar the very emblem of Rome. But the imperial power had the operation of one of those great laws of nature which through partial evil sustain the earth—a gravitating principle which, if it checked the ascent of some gifted beings beyond the dull level of life, yet kept the infinite multitude of men and things from flying loose beyond all utility and all control.

Yet it was only for a time. The empire was but the superstructure of the republic, a richer, more luxuriant, and more transitory object for the eye of the world, and the storm was already gathering that was to shake it to the ground. The corruptions of the palace first opened the imperial ruin. They soon extended through every department of the state. If the habitual fears of the tyrant in the midst of a headlong populace could scarcely restrain him in Rome, what must be the excesses of his minions where no fear was felt, where complaint was stifled by the dagger, and where the government was bought with bribes, to be replaced only by licensed rapine!

The East was the chief victim. The vast northern and western provinces of the empire pressed too closely on Rome, were too poor and too warlike to be the favorite objects of Italian rapacity. There a new tax raised an insurrection; the proconsular demand of a loan was answered by a flight which stripped the land, or by the march of some unheard-of tribe, pouring down from the desert to avenge their countrymen. The character, too, of the people, influenced the choice of their governors. Brave and experienced soldiers, not empty and vicious courtiers, must command the armies that were thus liable to be hourly in battle, and on whose discipline depended the slumbers of every pillow in Italy. Stern as is the life of camps, it has its virtues, and men are taught consideration for the feelings, rights, and resentments of man by a teacher that makes its voice heard through the tumult of battle and the pride of victory. But all was reversed in Asia, remote, rich, habituated to despotism, divided in language, religion, and blood; with nothing of that fierce, yet generous clanship, which made the Gaul of the Belgian marshes listen to the trumpet of the Gaul of Narbonne, and the German of the Vistula burn with the wrongs of the German of the Rhine.

Under Nero, Judea was devoured by Roman avarice. She had not even the sad consolation of owing her evils to the ravage of those nobler beasts of prey in human shape that were to be found in the other provinces—she was devoured by locusts. The polluted palace supplied her governors; a slave lifted into office by a fellow slave; a pampered profligate, exhausted by the expenses of the capital; a condemned and notorious extortioner, with no other spot to hide his head, were the gifts of Nero to my country. Pilate, Felix, Festus, Albinus, Florus, a race more profligate and cruel as our catastrophe approached, tore the very bowels of the land. Of the last two it was said that Albinus should have been grateful to Florus for proving that he was not the basest of mankind, by the evidence that a baser existed; that he had a respect for virtue by his condescending to commit those robberies in private which his successor committed in public; and that he had human feeling by his abstaining from blood where he could gain nothing by murder; while Florus disdained alike concealment and cause, and slaughtered for the public pleasure of the sword!

A number of partial insurrections, easily suppressed, displayed the wrath of the people and indulged the cruelty of the procurator. They indulged also his avarice. Defeat was followed by confiscation; and Florus even boasted that he desired nothing more prosperous than insurrection in every village of Judea. He was about to be gratified before he had prepared himself for this luxury!

A menial in my house was detected with letters from an agent of the Roman governor. They required details of my habits and resources, which satisfied me that I had become an object of vengeance. From the time of my return I had seen with bitterness of soul the insults to my country. I had summoned my friends to ascertain what might be our means of resistance, and found them as willing and devoted as became men; but our resources for more than the first burst of popular wrath, the seizure of some petty Roman garrison, or the capture of a convoy, were nothing. The jealousies of the chief men of the tribes, the terrors of Rome, the positions of the Roman troops, cutting off military communication between the north and south of Judea, made the attempt hopeless, and it was abandoned for the time. Even those letters which marked me for a victim made no change in my determination that if I could not escape danger by individual means, no public blood should be laid to my charge. For a few months all was tranquil; the habits of rural life are calculated to keep depressing thoughts at a distance. My wife and daughters returned to their graceful pursuits, with the added pleasure of novelty after so long a cessation. I hunted through the hills with Constantius, or, traversing the country which might yet be the scene of events, availed myself of the knowledge of a master of the whole science of Roman war.

At home the works of the great poets of the West, with whom our guest had made us familiar, varied the hours; but I found a still more stirring and congenial interest in the histories of Greek valor, and in the study of the mighty minds that made and unmade empires.

With the touching and picturesque narrative of Herodotus in my hand, I pantingly followed the adventures of the most brilliant of nations. I fought the battle with them against the Persian; I saw them gathered in little startled groups on the hills, or flying in their little galleys from island to island, the land deserted, the sea covered with fugitives; the Persian fleets loaded with Asiatic pomp, darkening the waters like a thunder-cloud—and in a moment all changed! The millions of Asia scattered like dust before the wind—Greece lifted to the height of martial glory, and commencing a career of triumph still more illustrious, that triumph of the mind in which, through the remotest vicissitudes of earth, she was to have no conqueror.

I especially and passionately pursued the campaigns of that extraordinary man Arrian, whose valor, vanity, and fortune make him one of the landmarks of human nature. In Alexander I delighted in tracing the native form of the Greek through the embroidered robes of royalty and triumph. In his romantic intrepidity and deliberate science, his alternations of profound thought and fantastic folly, the passion for praise and the contempt for its offerers, the rash temper and the noble magnanimity, the love for the arts and the thirst for that perpetual war before which they fly, the philosophic scorn of privation and the feeble lapses into self-indulgence; the generous forecast, which peopled deserts and founded cities, and the giddy and fatal neglect which left his diadem to be fought for and his family to be the prey of rival rebellions,—I saw the true man of the republic; not the lord of the rugged hills of Macedon, but the Athenian of the day of popular splendor and folly, with only the difference of the scepter.

To me those studies were like a new door opened into the boundless palace of human nature. I felt that sense of novelty, vigor, and fresh life that the frame feels in breathing the morning air over the landscape of a new country. It was a voyage on an unknown sea, where every headland administers to the delight of curiosity. In this there was nothing of the common pedantry of the schools. My knowledge of life had hitherto been limited by my original destination. A Jew and a priest, there was but one solemn avenue through which I was to see the glimpses of the external world. The vista was now opened beyond all limit; visions of conquest, of honor among nations, of praise to the last posterity, clustered round my head. There were times when in this exultation even my doom was forgotten. The momentary oblivion may have been permitted merely to blunt the edge of incurable misfortune. I was permitted at intervals to recruit the strength that was to be tried till the end of time.