The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard TaylorConwell, Russell H.
General
The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor
Conwell, Russell H.
Taylor, Bayard, 1825-1878
was luxuriant, or at a season when the sun and simoon have made it a
desert. To lie upon its burning sands and dream of the sweltering hosts
that fought around the spot; to bask in the cool shades of its olives
and cedars, and think of Gethsemane and the sweets of Sharon; to stand
on the summit of the Mount of Olives, Carmel, or Hermon, and realize the
almost overwhelming fact that before him were the plains, hills, valleys,
conquered and reconquered since man was made, and which were peopled by
the great, the good, the wild, and the bloodthirsty of every age; to
recognize the localities where dwelt or fought the heroes of Holy Writ;
to feel the presence of the King of kings as “on mysterious wings” he
swept the plain and shielded his people; to walk on the very path whereon
the Son of God had often placed his feet; to dream in the starlight of
Apostles, priests, Romans, Crusaders, and Saracens, was an experience
especially gratifying to him, and interesting to a greater or less degree
to all travellers. The writer recalls, perhaps in an imperfect form, a
verse which Mr. Taylor wrote during his stay in Palestine, and which came
to the writer with singular force while carelessly wandering along the
valley between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.
“Thy strength, Jerusalem, is o’er,
And broken are thy walls;
The harp of Israel sounds no more
In thy deserted halls:
But where thy Kings and Prophets trod,
Triumphant over death,
Behold the living soul of God,—
The Christ of Nazareth!
The halo of his presence fills
Thy courts, thy ways of men;
His footsteps on thy holy hills
Are beautiful as then;
The prayer, whose bloody sweat betrayed
His human agony,
Still haunts the awful olive-shade
Of old Gethsemane.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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