One young nurse, whom we all loved, before any candle was lighted would often strain her eye to read it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings; and they suited also the divine revelations of power and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man--man and yet _not_ man, real above all things and yet shadowy above all things, who had suffered the passion of death in Palestine--slept upon our minds like early dawn upon the waters. The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differences in Oriental climates; and all these differences (as it happens) express themselves in the great varieties of summer. The cloudless sun-lights of Syria--those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears of corn--that _must_ be summer; but above all, the very name of Palm Sunday (a festival in the English Church) troubled me like an anthem. "Sunday!" what was _that_? That was the day of peace which masked another peace, deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were they? _That_ was an equivocal word; palms in the sense of trophies expressed the pomps of life; palms as a product of nature expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still, even this explanation does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest below all rest, and of ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be the _omphalos_ (navel) of the earth? That pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for Delphi; and both pretensions had become ridiculous as the figure of the planet became known. Yes, but if not of the earth, for earth's tenant Jerusalem was the _omphalos_ of mortality. Yet how? There on the contrary it was, as we infants understood, that mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but for that very reason, there it was that mortality had opened its very gloomiest crater. There it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the grave; but for that reason, there also it was that the Divine had been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not rise before the greater would submit to eclipse. Summer therefore had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antagonism, but also through intricate relations to Scriptural scenery and events.