The Sun.
London, England, 1865-06-19 00:00:00

minds us, larger than France and Italy—no law
" save that of the stealthy hand and the smiting
sword." Whatsoever may chance to be the varying
mood in which he writes, our traveller's gaze,
whithersoever his footsteps wander over the Holy
Land is always calmly but keenly upon the alert
—vividly conscious of all the aspects of the scenes
around him, of all their remote antecedents, of all their
manifold and most affecting associations. Nature
and art—nature in all her barrenness and fertility,
art in all its dreary disfigurement and desolation—
appeal with about an equal force to his interest and
his sensibilities. The vine, the figtree, and the
olive, those fruits and plants that, as he ex-
presses it, " love " the holy soil the green
figs that have a flavour, as he tells us, " that
they who once eat them will remember as an
Egyptian is said to recollect the Nile"—the palm
and the oleander--the cedar and the anemone—not
a flower that blows, not a tree that overshadows
the land, but he notes with a tender eagerness of
appreciation, by the wayside, to the right hand and
to the left, as he passes onwards. In his descrip-
tion of the Birthplace of the Redeemer he particu-
larises with an especial emphasis its ancient title
Ephrath, meaning the Place of Fruit, and its
newer name Bethlehem, meaning [a name fraught,
as it appears to us, with a truly wonderful signifi-
cance] the House of Bread ! That beatified hill of
Bethlehem, is described by him as—in yonder torrid
clime,in the midst of those wild,arid wastes—"almost
green !" Scattered hither and thither over the face
of Palestine he describes to us those groups
and clusters of " white cubes, called houses," that
still to this day denote, as they or the like of them
were wont to denote, centuries upon centuries ago,
the chosen scenes where, among the motley
nomadic races around them, the ancient population
were wont to take up their abode, some in open
towns, others in walled cities, others in mere vil-
lages like this one, originally founded years upon
years gone by, on that lovely and still verdurous and
efflorescent hill of Bethlehem. In the delineation
of the chequered aspect of the whole of that thrice-
consecrated region, known in both hemispheres dis-
tinctively, as by a household word, as the Holy
Land, the writer of this work shows an equal atten-
tion to vividness of colouring and minuteness of
detail, whether his particular theme at the moment
chances to be animate or inanimate, botanical or
archaeological, the human beings immediately around
him, or the fauna and the flora of that alternately
fruitful and sterile soil of Palestine. Simply taking
pen in hand—writing and not painting or draw-
ing—he nevertheless so writes about all that passes
before his actual or his mental vision—in his medi-
tations upon the past, in his observations upon. the
present—during those recent wanderings of his in
the Holy Land that although his impressions are
revealed to us as merely in black and white, they
are manifestations on his part—manifestations very
readily appreciable as it appears to us—of the feeling
of an artist, of the colouring of a painter, of the
facile pencilling of a skilled and practised
draughtsman. his scenes, in other words, are
realised to us almost as vividly in their outline, in
their colouring, and in their movement, as any of
the magical pictures, palpitating with life to all ap-
pearance, upon the disc of a camera obscura—the
leaves quivering in the wind, the tides rolling in
upon the shore ! Take, as an instance of this,
the passages relating more especially to Nazareth
and to the Blessed Virgin, in Mr. Dixon's ex-
quisite chapter about the Holy Family—passages
which, we will admit (while giving them thus
as apparently mere haphazard illustrations) are
among the most beautiful in the whole narrative, as
for that matter they ought, in truth, to have been if
only by reason of their respective subjects. Of the
chosen home of the Holy Family, during very
nearly thirty years consecutively—thirty years
complete, saving only for the interval of the sojourn
in the Land of Egypt, thus writes this latest and
not least among the reverent delineators of the
Holy Land :

" Four miles south of the strong Greek city of Sephoris,
hidden away among gentle hills, then covered from the
base to the crown with vineyards and fig trees, lay a natu-
ral nest or basin of rich red and white earth, star like in
shape, about a mile in width, and wondrously fertile.
Along the scarred and chalky slope of the highest of these
hills spread a small and lovely village, which, in a land
where every stone seemed to have a story, is remarkable
as having had no public history and no distinguishable
native name. No great road led up to this sunny nook.
No traffic came into it, no legions marched through it.
Trade, war, adventure, pleasure, pomp, passed by it, flow-
ing from west to east, from east to west, along the Roman
road. But the meadows were a-glow with wheat and bar-
ley. Near the low ground ran a bolt of gardens, fenced
with loose stones, in which myriads of green figs, pome-
granates, and golden citrons ripened in the summer sun.
High up the slopes, which were lined and planted like
the Rhine at Bingen, hung vintages of purple grapes. In
the plain, among the corn and beneath the mulberry
trees and figs, shone daisies and poppies, tulips, lilies,
and anemones, endless in their profusion, brilliant in their
dyes." _ _ _

Thus tenderly, too, as with a sense at once of the
lovelyand the venerable, does he write about the Virgin
Mother of the Redeemer—who bore Him at the
age of fifteen—" That she was fair and comely," he
says, " was a constant tradition of the early Church ;
a girl having a style of beauty like that of David and
Solomon, which is rare in hot countries, and when
it occurs is most highly prized. If the Church tra-
ditions may be trusted on such a point, backed by
such evidence as the Byzantine mosaics and the
early missals, the Virgin had blue eyes, a pale skin,
low colour, a sweet oval face, with abundance of
golden hair." Her household life, there, at Nazareth,
during very nearly thirty of the three-and-thirty
years of His sojourn upon earth, is thus picturesquely
and vividly realised to our imagination :

" In her ways of life, she would act no otherwise than
like the young Hebrew woman of her time and of all times.
She would riso early in the day, and going with her creel
into the market-place, fill it with melons and fresh figs,
with green cucumbers and grapes. At the third hour she
would recite her shema, and at the ninth hour sing a
psalm of David. In the evening she would go down with
her pitcher to the well and fill it. On the Sabbath, after
washing hands, she would go up to the synagogue on the
hill top, where she would sit among the women behind the
screen, and hear the Sheliach repeat the lesson set apart
for that day. For the rest of her simple and homely life,
like the women of her class in these Syrian villages at the
present hour, she would boil her pottage over a wood fire,
lay her maize on the flat roof to dry, spin thread for do-
mestic use, sweep the dust from her lowan at dusk, and
expecting her husband and her son to come home, spread
her mats on tho floor and set her *lands for them in the
shadiest nook of her little court."

Immediately afterwards—as if by way of affording,
very beautifully, as it seems to us, an accumula-
tion of evidence of the exact fulfilment of the pro-
phetic declaration of the Mater Dei Genitrix in
the "Magnificat," omnes generationes beata me
dicent—we find here, too, in this central
portion of Mr. Dixon's work upon the "Holy
Land" the following exquisite commemoration of
the love and veneration lavished throughout all ages,
throughout all parts of Christendom, upon one
whose distinctive glory it is among women to be
Mater Christi sed semper virginum

" Our western fancies, working through an instinct of
nature safer than half-knowledge, have made of this simple
life a pastoral full of grace and beauty. Hearing that the
years of her youth and womanhood were spent, before she
yet knew grief, on this sunny hill slope, her feet being for
ever among the daisies, poppies, and anemones which grew
everywhere about, we have made her the patroness of all
our flowers. The Virgin is our Rose of Sharon, our lily of
the valley. The poetry, no less than the piety, of Europe
has inscribed to her the whole bloom and colouring of the
fields and hedges. May is her month. Gardens are trimmed
in her service, and all her chapels are decked and garlanded
with nosegays. The favourites of our meadows, some of
them unknown to the Flora of her own Galileo, bear names
which are derived from her:—such as lady grass, lady
slipper, lady's key, marigold, and maidenhair. But the rose
and the lily—the rose for its lustre, the lily for its sweet-
ness (surely, rather for its purity ?]—are, more than any
others, considered as the Virgin's own. These flowers
belong to the landscape of Middle Galilee no loss than to
the poetry of the Christian world."

With this crowning extract—a passage in its
eloquent simplicity like a very garland of flowers—
we must now, however, close our already over-
lengthy notice of these two beautiful volumes upon
Palestine. Volumes they are of such rare and
genuine excellence—as surely we have had an op-
portunity above of very clearly demonstrating—
that upon the production of them we may cor-
dially and most unaffectedly proffer to the author
our most earnest congratulations. It is something,
surely, to have written so goodly a book as this upon
the Land of the Redemption.