where we admit his conclusions we do not always accede to the correctness of his reasonings. But for his deep and clear intuitions; for his large and comprehensive view of things; for the sublime confidence with which he leans on principles alone; for the serene and lofty tone of moral feeling which pervades his works; for the earnestness with which he siezes upon the right and true wherever found, he cannot be too highly honored. These are what constitute his peculiar greatness; and they will give a charm and vitality to his works long after the temporary events, which called them out, shall be past and forgotten.

J. H. M.

MISCELLANY.

SCENES IN JUDEA.

I.

PRAISE to the God of Abraham.

The locusts are flown. The land, which they found flourishing and verdant as a garden, they have changed to the barrenness of a desert. The cities and the villages, but now so full of people, are become the re-. gion of desolation and death. Even the very city and house of God are level with the dust, and the ploughshare has gone over them. And here, upon the hill of Olives, I sit, a living witness of the ruin. By reason of the wonderful compassions of God, which never fail, I am escaped as a bird from the net of the fowler. Yet I take little joy in this. For why should the days of one like me be lengthened out, when the mighty and excellent of the land are cut off? I rather rejoice in this, that the spoiler is gone; the armies of the alien have ceased to devour; and those who are fled, and who are hidden in caves and dens of the rocks, may come forth again to inhabit the land and build up the waste places. A multitude which no man could number have fallen before the edge of the sword, or

by famine, and the air is full of the pestilential vapors that steam up from their rotting carcases. But a greater multitude remains; and it may well be that ere many years have passed, they shall fill the land as before, and gathered into one by him who, though long delaying, will come, pay back, and more, the measure they have received. That time will surely come. Even as the Assyrian could not finally destroy, but the hand of the Almighty was put forth, and the city and the temple grew up again from their ruins to a greater glory than before, so shall it be now. The Roman triumph shall be short. Messiah shall yet appear; and Jerusalem clothed in her beautiful garments shall sit upon her hills, the joy and crown of the whole earth.

But for me, my eyes shall not behold it. Before that day these aged limbs shall rest in the sepulchres of Beth-Harem, and these walls will have fallen and mingled with the common earth. It is not to-morrow, nor the day after, that the kingdom shall come. Impatient Israel will not wait the appointed hour; she will not remember that with the Lord a thousand years is as a day, and a day as a thousand years. She will reign today or never. Her mad haste has drawn upon her this wide destruction. Deceivers, and those who had deceived themselves, fools and wicked men, have led her to the precipice, down which she hath fallen, and now lies, as a potter's vessel, broken in fragments. And I, alas, am not clear in the great transgression. The rage which filled the people was in my heart also. I too gave heed to lying prophets, and bent my knee before him who called himself a Son of God, and licked the dust at his feet, and bound myself for life and for death to his chariot wheels. May he whose compassions are infinite pity and forgive his servant. It is with my soul low in the dust before him, that I turn to the long past, and remember the early errors of my life. And why will ye of Rome press upon me the unwelcome task? My kinsmen might well forego the pleasure they may reap for the pain that will be my only harvest. Yet not my only harvest. The memory of the days which were spent where Judith and Onias dwelt will bring with it pleasant thoughts, -if many bitter and self-reproachful also. Happily of this portion of my life, of which ye are chiefly desirous to hear, the record already exists; from which I need but draw in such fragments as shall impart all that I may care to reveal. That record lies before me just as it went forth from my full heart, and was poured into the bosom of that more than

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woman,my protecting angel, rather, Naomi the blessed. As the scenes of my earlier life rise before me out of these leaves, distinct as the outlines of these barren hills, so too does the image of my mother come up out of the obscurity of the past, and stand before me, clear and beautiful to the eye as when clothed in flesh. It was to thee, thou true mother in Israel, that I made myself visible and plain to read as a parchment scroll, and from thee in return received those holy counsels, charged with a divine wisdom, which were a pillar of light to my path; and, had I heeded them, had saved me from every error, as they did from more than I can now remember or

recount.

Concerning my birth and childhood in Rome, and the years which preceded my departure for the East, it needs not that I speak; for of that part of my life enough is known, and I can take no pleasure in re-perusing it. From the parchments transmitted to me long since by my mother from Rome, I now draw what shall give you a somewhat living picture of those days in Judea, about which you are chiefly desirous to hear. I thus addressed my mother, soon after reaching Cæsarea :

"You who know your son so well will not doubt that I took my departure from Antioch with pain. Nowhere since I passed the gates of Rome have I been entertained with such magnificence. Nowhere have the hours proved themselves so short-lived. After the dulness of Athens, and the worse than dulness of Smyrna, Ephesus, and Rhodes, it was refreshing to witness the noise and stir of the mistress of the East. So frequent were the theatres, baths, and porticos, the shows, the games, the combats of wild beasts, that I felt myself almost in the Elysium of my own Rome. What added, too, as you will believe, to my happiness, was this, that I passed everywhere for a Roman of undoubted Roman blood, or at least, if my descent were seen, with a civility which seems native to these orientals, the knowledge of it was not betrayed by word or look. I perceive you both to smile at this, as also to utter a few words expressive of a gentle contempt for an unworthy scion of an ancient house. The contempt from you I can bear; but the smile by which you can seem to enjoy what you are pleased to term my credulity, I must say and believe is wasted. For more than once have I been assured by some of my own tribe that, but for a something in my eye, they should not suspect me to be other than a Roman. Neither, my mother, was this flattery;

it was from some incapable of that meanest vice; from my real friends. But whoever were so blind as to take me for a Roman, you may be assured I was not careful to undeceive them. I enjoyed the perfect felicity while I might. And the dream was undisturbed during the whole of my sojourn there, except in a single instance, when once as I was walking in front of the baths of Tiberius, I saw approaching from an opposite point the lordly Drusus, who, as I gave signs of saluting him, turned his face in another direction, and swept along without recognising me. What think you of that? At this distance I can see your color change. But if you even feel the insult, who live so shut out from the great world, how much more must I who am in it. I think your censure is too sharp upon me when at such moments I, somewhat hastily perhaps, wish the twelve tribes had found the fate of Pharaoh, seeing that to little else than scorn and curses, hatred and oppression, are they born who come of their lineage. Willingly would I renounce all the wisdom I have ever found in Moses and the prophets, for a little of that equal honor in the eyes of men, which more methinks than questions of philosophy or religion concerns a man's well-being. My eye is not far searching enough to discern a single advantage in the position the Jew fills in this great theatre of life. He cherishes in his soul his faith, which he holds to be nobler and purer than that of Pythagoras or Cicero. But however much nobler and purer in his own eye, when did other than a Jew so esteem it? Who ever has heard of a Roman, a Greek, or an Egyptian, becoming a Jew, or receiving in any portion, however small, the Jewish faith? Yet is it likely that through so many ages a religion given of God should have remained in the world, and yet never have convinced men of its divinity? I, alas, have not even a conviction of its truth to sustain me under this burden of contempt and reproach. I am a Jew outwardly, carrying the signs of my descent and origin in my face and form, branded in by the hand that made me, and by the hand that reared me, and this I cannot help. But with readiness would I lose one half my limbs and trunk, if from what remained these scars and seams of ignominy were fairly erased. You say that in Rome I mix freely with the Roman youth, that I sit at their tables and they at mine, that I join them at the games, and in every amusement of our city life. It is true; yet still I am a Jew. I am beloved of many

because I am Julian; yet by the very same am I abhorred be

cause I am a Jew. The Roman beggar who takes my gold, for gold is gold, begs pardon of the gods, and as he turns the corner scours the coin upon the sand. Yet, my mother, I see not why one people should thus proscribe another; nor do I look upon the wrong but with indignation. You justly accuse me with indifference to the religion of my fathers. But I have never beheld with patience the slights, insults, and oppressions which, by the stronger, have been heaped upon the weaker; nor, truly, when I reflect, can I see why the worship of a people should be charged upon them as a crime. It is these inquiries which have roused within me, at times, the Jew; however for the most part, in my search after pleasure, I have been too ready to forget all but what ministered directly to that end. If thou art filled with wonder at so serious a vein in me, I will soon give thee the reasons; but let me first speak of my passage hither, and of that which happened immediately on my arrival.

"I left Antioch, as I have said, with regret. At the mouth of the Orontes I embarked in a trader, bound first to Cæsarea, and then to Joppa and Alexandria. We at first were driven out by an east wind, and ran quite along the shores of Cyprus; but this soon subsiding, we crossed over again to the Syrian coast, and were afterward enabled to keep our vessel so near, -the breezes being gentle and from a safe quarter, — that I enjoyed a continued prospect of the country, with as much distinctness and satisfaction, I think, as if I had been travelling by land; at least with distinctness enough; for every pleasure of this sort is increased by a certain degree of obscurity and dimness. Painters understand this, and over their works throw a sort of haze by some mysterious process of their divine art, which imparts to them their principal charm. No prospect and no picture is beautiful which is clear and sharp as if cut in metal. Truth itself is to me improved by a veil of this same mistiness thrown around it. But if any fault is to be found with this Syrian atmosphere, it is that of this all-involving dimness there is something too much, to that degree, indeed, that the eye is too often cheated of the distant features of the landscape; -the mountains which, drawn upon the chart before us, we know to be not far distant, not too far for the eye to reach with ease, being cut off entirely by this purple wall of partition. Happily as we drew near the port of Berytus, beyond which lay the mountains of the Libanus and Anti-Libanus, there was not so much of the quality of which I speak in the air, as to