, ranged on blocks of the surrounding
mountains, were a variety of sculptured figures of costly materials
and exquisite beauty; forms of heroic majesty and ideal grace; and,
themselves serene and unimpassioned, filling the minds of the beholders
with awe and veneration. It was not until his eye was accustomed to the
atmosphere, and his mind had in some degree recovered from the first
strange surprise, that Tancred gradually recognised the fair and famous
images over which his youth had so long and so early pondered. Stole
over his spirit the countenance august, with the flowing beard and
the lordly locks, sublime on his ivory throne, in one hand the ready
thunderbolt, in the other the cypress sceptre; at his feet the watchful
eagle with expanded wings: stole over the spirit of the gazing pilgrim,
each shape of that refined and elegant hierarchy made for the worship
of clear skies and sunny lands; goddess and god, genius and nymph,
and faun, all that the wit and heart of man can devise and create, to
represent his genius and his passion, all that the myriad developments
of a beautiful nature can require for their personification. A beautiful
and sometimes flickering light played over the sacred groups and
figures, softening the ravages of time, and occasionally investing them
with, as it were, a celestial movement.

'The gods of the Greeks!' exclaimed Tancred.

'The gods of the Ansarey,' said the Queen; 'the gods of my fathers!'

'I am filled with a sweet amazement,' murmured Tancred. 'Life is
stranger than I deemed. My soul is, as it were, unsphered.'

'Yet you know them to be gods,' said the Queen; 'and the Emir of the
Lebanon does not know them to be gods?'

'I feel that they are such,' said Fakredeen.

'How is this, then?' said the Queen. 'How is it that you, the child of a
northern isle----'

'Should recognise the Olympian Jove,' said Tancred. 'It seems strange;
but from my earliest youth I learnt these things.'

'Ah, then,' murmured the Queen to herself, and with an expression of the
greatest satisfaction, 'Dar-kush was rightly informed; he is one of us.'

'I behold then, at last, the gods of the Ansarey,' said Fakredeen.

'All that remains of Antioch, noble Emir; of Anti-och the superb, with
its hundred towers, and its sacred groves and fanes of flashing beauty.'

'Unhappy Asia!' exclaimed the Emir; 'thou hast indeed fallen!'

'When all was over,' said the Queen; 'when the people refused to
sacrifice,