In exactly the same manner, the great Canadian lakes, prevent any rise to the St. Lawrence, by the immense floods that rush into them in the spring spreading over their vast beds, and producing only an almost inappreciable elevation of their level. Lebanon, the feeder of the Jordan from its internal reservoirs, along with “Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus,” and the Orontes, gives birth to many rapid and brawling streams, and a thousand cascades, when its snows melt, which strikingly display the erosive power of running water. Deep passages have been cut in the rocks, bestrided by natural arches, like the rock-bridge of Virginia. Of this description is the natural bridge over the Ain el Leban, rising nearly two hundred feet above the torrent which has gradually dug the excavation, as annually the spring has renewed its strength. The brook flows into the Beyrout river, and its channel would be quite dry in summer, were it not for the impediments its mountain course presents. It was the spring season, the time of the melting of the snow, when the monarch of Israel, during his temporary exile from the throne, retreated for a refuge toward the fastnesses of Lebanon. He saw the torrents falling from height to height into the valleys. He heard the voices of the waters as they leaped from rock to rock. His imagination converted this external scenery into a picture of the force of his adversities; and hence the allusion, in the plaintive elegiac, commemorative of his condition, to the “noise of cataracts,” and to “deep calling unto deep.”