_The barge she sat in, like a burnisht throne,_ _Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,_ _Purple the sails and so perfumed that_ _The winds were love-sick._ _With them the oars were silver,_ _Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke_ _And made the water which they beat, to follow faster,_ _As amorous of their strokes. For her own person_ _It beggared all description, she did lie_ _In her pavilion, cloth of gold, of tissue,_ _O’erpicturing that Venus, where we see_ _The fancy outwork nature. On each side her_ _Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,_ _With divers-colored fans whose wind did seem,_ _To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,_ _And what they undid did._ The old capital of Cilicia is, of truth, a city of a wonderful historic past. But among all her proud memories those which have made her best known throughout the ages and which will endure the longest are not those of her abounding wealth and luxury, her superb monuments and palaces and temples, long in ruins; not those that clustered around her poets and philosophers and made her a favored sanctuary of the Muses; not those of her schools and gymnasia and her one-time eminence as the rival of Athens and Alexandria as the home of learning and culture; not those of Persian satraps and Roman proconsuls who here lived as the famed representatives of imperial authority; not those awakened by the presence within her gates of an Asurbanipal, an Alexander, or a Cicero; not those associated with the love-enmeshed Mark Anthony and the fateful “Siren of the Nile,” who both perished the ignoble victims of a debasing passion and a foiled ambition. No; that which has rendered her immortal is that she was the birthplace of a poor tent maker who was disowned by his own family because he became the bond servant of the Crucified, to whom he bore witness from Jerusalem to Rome; of one who, while preaching the good tidings of the Gospel, toiled night and day lest he should “be chargeable to any one”; one who, while preaching the Kingdom of God, was accused by the Thessalonian Jews of “turning the world upside down”;[211] one who, during his long and fruitful apostolate and his almost superhuman labors in the service of his Master, gloried in persecution and was the frequent victim of stripes and chains and imprisonment; one who was the fearless teacher and the strong supporter of the infant Church, and whose matchless Epistles have, during nineteen centuries, been the guide of doctors and professors; one who wrote his own epitaph when he declared “To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” and who, in the capital of the Cæsars, won an Apostle’s exceeding great reward--a martyr’s crown; one whom his contemporaries knew as Saul, otherwise Paul,[212] of Tarsus.