Leaving Damascus.—Arrival at Beyrout.—Trip to Aleppo.—Enters Asia Minor.—The Scenery and People.—The Hills of Lebanon.—Beautiful Scenes about Brousa.—Enters Constantinople.—A Prophesy.—Return to Smyrna.—Again in Italy.—Visits his German Friend at Gotha.—The Home of his Second Love.—Goes to London.—Visits Gibraltar.—Cadiz.—Seville.—Spanish History. “Upon the glittering pageantries Of gay Damascus streets I look As idly as a babe, that sees The painted pictures of a book.” —_Taylor’s Oriental Idyl._ From Damascus Mr. Taylor journeyed to Baalbec, where are the most imposing ruins to be found in Syria, and where stand six of the most symmetrical and exquisitely carved columns to be seen in Asia or Europe. He described the temples and fragments so vividly, that travellers who have taken his “Lands of the Saracen” for a guide have seldom been disappointed or mistaken in their anticipations, the actual scene they look upon being so like the image they formed in their minds while reading his description. The gift of portraying through the combination of words and sentences an accurate picture of a city existing in a strange land and amid a strange people, is a rare gift, and the number is very few of those who are found to possess it. Mr. Taylor was one of those privileged ones. In his description we see the columns, cornices, pediments, walls, platforms, broken pillars, and falling pavilions as distinctly as they appear when we afterwards look upon those romantic piles with the natural eye. To him, as to others, it was a study to determine, if possible, how such enormous blocks of stone, sixty-two feet long and ten feet in diameter, could have been transported and placed in the buildings. It is beyond all the skill of to-day to move nine thousand tons of stone in a single block with the conveniences of that time. From Baalbec he ascended the Lebanon range of mountains, and looked over the land from the snowy peak of one of its lofty summits. He visited the sacred cedars which have lived on the mountain-side for three thousand years, and then rode on through chasms, along cliffs, and by the sweetest and richest dells, until he descended to the plain of Beyrout. His appreciation of the hills of Lebanon is more clearly seen in his poetry than in his prose. For, when writing of them afterwards, he said:— “Lebanon, thou mount of story, Well we know thy sturdy glory, Since the days of Solomon; Well me know the Five old Cedars, Scarred by ages,—silent pleaders, Preaching in their gray sedateness, Of thy forest’s fallen greatness, Of the vessels of the Tyrian And the palaces Assyrian And the temple on Moriah To the High and Holy One! Know the wealth of thy appointment— Myrrh and aloes, gum and ointment; But we knew not, till we clomb thee, Of the nectar dropping from thee,— Of the pure, pellucid Ophir In the cups of vino d’oro, On the hills of Lebanon!”