“I was prepared for milk and honey,” said Euphrosyne, “but this is too
delightful,” as she travelled through lanes of date-bearing palm-trees,
and sniffed with her almond-shaped nostrils the all-pervading fragrance.
They passed the night at Arimathea, a pretty village surrounded
with gardens enclosed with hedges of prickly pear. Here they found
hospitality, in an old convent, but all the comforts of Europe and many
of the refinements of Asia had been forwarded for their accommodations.
“It is a great homage to art,” said Mr. Phoebus, as he scattered his
gold like a great seigneur of Gascony.
The next day, two miles from Jerusalem, the consul met them with a
cavalcade, and the ladies assured their host that they were not at all
wearied with their journey, but were quite prepared, in due time, to
join his dinner-party, which he was most anxious they should attend, as
he had “two English lords” who had arrived, and whom he had invited
to meet them. They were all curious to know their names, though that,
unfortunately, the consul could not tell them, but he had sent to the
English consulate to have them written down. All he could assure them
was, that they were real English lords, not travelling English lords,
but in sober earnestness great personages.
Mr. Phoebus was highly gratified. He was pleased with his reception.
There was nothing he liked much more than a procession. He was also a
sincere admirer of the aristocracy of his country. “On the whole,”
he would say, “they most resemble the old Hellenic race; excelling in
athletic sports, speaking no other language than their own, and never
reading.”
“Your fault,” he would sometimes say to Lothair, “and the cause of many
of your sorrows, is the habit of mental introspection. Man is born to
observe, but if he falls into psychology he observes nothing, and then
he is astonished that life has no charms for him, or that, never seizing
the occasion, his career is a failure. No, sir, it is the eye that must
be occupied and cultivated; no one knows the capacity of the eye who has
not developed it, or the visions of beauty and delight and inexhaustible
interest which it commands. To a man who observes, life is as different
as the existence of a dreaming psychologist is to that of the animals of
the field.”
“I fear,” said Lothair, “that I have at length found out the truth, and
that I am a dreaming psychologist.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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