s. 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 sunlights 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 masqued 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.

Out of this digression, which was almost necessary for the purpose of
showing how inextricably my feelings and images of death were entangled
with those of summer, I