Preface

I now finish the notes of my eastern journey. They are the same in kind as those of the former volume.

I have been short in describing well-known places, and longer in my notes of those not so often visited. Hence the sea-plain, from Sidon southward, has been briefly noticed; while Beersheba, the Interior of the great Mosque at J erusalem, the Quarries underneath the city, and the Mounds of ashes outside, have been taken up more at length. Some topographical discussions, which would have broken up the narrative, have been cast into an Appendix. The list of Books and the Index I meant to have made fuller, but have been staid by the unlooked-for growth and size of the volume.

Lest I should be thought to have but written over again what has been better done already by others, I may say this, that Palestine bears to be often visited, and can afford to be spoken of for the hundredth time without iv

yielding less to one that may come after. Each new study of its history or geography, if rightly guiding itself,’will lay open new formations, and take us down into new deposits. Its great events have not erased each other, as is often the case in other histories. They have not come like wave on wave, or like the ripple on the sand, effacing all that has been before. They have formed so many separate strata, each of which remains for ever, ready to give up its story to any one that will search. Nor in getting possession of these fossils, do we handle dead matter or useless relics. Each of them, so soon as touched, seems to come alive again, and to speak to us with its own fulness and energy and greatness. These old facts are all charged with divine thoughts; and that which is divine cannot die; or if it pass into that state which men call age or death, it yet fails not to retain the vitality of unforgotten youth; and he that casts himself upon it receives into his soul the pulse and quickening of its mighty life, as the dead Israelite when he touched the bones of the buried prophet.

Kelso, December 1. 1857.