But whatever is beautiful in the scenery of Palestine is peculiar to the north. In the south there is a sameness of outline and of color that wearies the eye and makes one sigh for variety; but north of the mountains of Ephraim the beholder is charmed with green plains and fertile valleys, with wooded dells and graceful hills, with rippling brooks and sylvan lakes, with leaping cascades and rushing rivers, with sublime chasms and profound ravines; and with lofty mountains, broken into beetling cliffs and craggy peaks, whose higher summits are capped with perpetual snow, and down whose furrowed sides rush a thousand torrents. There the most fastidious taste would be delighted with the wild mountain gorge encircling Tirzah, and the wilder chasm of el-Hamâm――with the beautiful glen of el-Haramîyeh, and the more lovely Vale of Abilîn――with the woodland parks of Carmel and Tabor――with the crystal lakes of Merom and Gennesaret――with the foaming, rapid waters of the Jordan, the Leontes, and the Adonis――with Mount Hermon, with summer at his feet, spring in his lap, and winter on his head――and with the magnificent scenery of Kadîsha, where the Syrian Alps lift their awful forms 13,000 feet high, covered with snow 100 feet deep――where the melting snows feed cascades, which in their descent are beaten into spray by the rocks, and which, reflecting the sunlight, seem like the infinite fragments of some gorgeous rainbow――and where rills from the hills and torrents from the mountains unite to swell the river below, which, after winding through the noblest and wildest of nature’s chasms, whose sides are lined with shrubbery, adorned with hamlets, and dotted with convents high up in the everlasting rocks, and whose solemn bells awaken the echoes of Lebanon, pours its accumulated waters into the Western Sea. If the standard of landscape beauty be the regular alternation of plain and mountain, as in Greece and Italy; the clean meadows, the well-made farms and green hills, as in France and England; or the continent-like prairies, the miniature seas, and multiform mountains of America, then the Land of Promise must yield the palm to those more highly-favored countries. But if the combination of all these characteristics on a smaller scale constitute the beautiful and grand in natural scenery, Palestine is not unworthily praised by the sacred writers for the variety and magnificence of its landscape.