1856.] A Storm on the North-East Coast. first streaks appeared in the east, as suddenly as it had risen, and the sun rose brightly out of the treacherous water, and tinged with pink the fleecy shreds of cloud that lingered upon the horizon. Having seen the last boat enter, we walked down to the beach of the bay, which for more than a couple of miles was literally black with boats. Many dead bodies lay on the shore-some as though they slept, but most of them scarred and mangled, the arms thrown tightly back, the faces blue and ghastly, the mouth rigid, with the death froth upon the lips. Every wave brought in a body-a heavy, inanimate mass, only to be distinguished, as it rocked to and fro, from the rest of the wreck by the blue shirting or the red handkerchief tied tightly round the waist. In a pool of water which the tide had left on the sand we found the body of a man almost entirely naked, with a deep wound across the brow, which did not, however, so entirely disfigure his face as to prevent us recognising one of the hardiest seamen of the town. He had evidently been prepared to swim when he found the crash inevitable, but the remorseless waves had cut the struggle short. Half a mile further 335 on we encountered a party of our fisher friends standing round their boat, which, with a great rent in one of its sides, lay half buried in the sand. I was much struck by an incident which one of them related. As they were rushing along before the gale in the open sea, the light of the small lantern hanging across the boat's bow flashed suddenly its clear light upon a large bird-one of the great northern divers, as they readily made out, for it was not more than a dozen yards from them, and they perfectly distinguished the white line of feathers that seams the black plumage of the back. It was half way up the long swell on which they were rising, its head was cushioned upon its wing, and it lay in perfect security, sleeping quietly through the storm. But as they passed it the light and the rushing foam broke its slumbers, and looking hastily around, it uttered its wild startled wail, and dived into the abyss. Altogether it was a memorable destruction, and will long be remembered with peculiar pain by the fishing population scattered along the north-eastern seaboard of Scotland. SHIRLEY. STANLEY'S SINAI AND PALESTINE.* THOSE who are familiar with the writings of Canon Stanley might imagine the kind of work he would write on a subject so suited to him, and so fruitful in itself as the history and geography of Sinai and Palestine. It is a book per se, genial, original, sensible, lit up by a gentle enthusiasm, rich in unaffected learning, and clear of all those faults which make most travels in the Holy Land so wearisome and so unreal. There is perhaps a want of that philosophical power and thorough love of truth, which give the highest interest to books on great subjects. Occasionally we are tempted to ask what the proposition can be against which the writer thinks he is contending, and what evidence making in his favour he would regret as unsatisfactory, We could wish that he had asked himself more precisely what is the exact value of a certain degree of geographical accuracy as a guarantee of truth. Had Mr. Stanley written with a nicer logic and a more searching spirit of inquiry, he would have written a book of a higher and more permanent interest; but it must be confessed that he would probably not have written SO pleasant a book, and certainly not so popular a one. When once we have made the deduction which candour forces us to admit with regard to this indistinctness of thought, we can find nothing in this admirable work which does not far exceed even all that the great promise of Mr. Stanley's_earlier writings led us to expect. For the first time, the Holy Land is really brought near to us; for the first time we see it as it is and as it has been, and for the first time we have been made to feel that the history, the manners, and the literature of the Jews were in a wonderful degree the reflection of the land in which they lived. Other men have travelled there, and written their travels, and uttered reflections and speculations on all they saw, but Mr. Stanley has done so much more than this, that he may almost be us. said to have discovered Palestine for Henceforward, every book of the Old and New Testament, every incident in the lives of the saints and prophets of Judæa, will have a new meaning for us, because the country which witnessed their origin and occurrence has been trod and painted by a man of genius. In the winter of 1852 and in the spring of 1853, accompanied by three friends, Mr. Stanley, to use his own language, 'visited the wellknown scenes of sacred history in Egypt, Arabia, and Syria.' He does not attempt to give any detailed account of his travels, his object being to bring the recollections of his journey to bear on the question how the history and geography of the chosen people are related. He endeavours to show how far the geographical features of the Holy Land influenced the national character and the forms of national expression, what light it throws on particular events, and how a poetical and proverbial use has come to be made of the geography of Palestine so much beyond any other instance in the geography of the world. In a concluding passage of his preface, Mr. Stanley describes in language so forcible and eloquent the peculiar connexion which for the traveller in these regions binds together the spots he traverses and the history on which his thoughts are dwelling, that we must place an extract before our readers. Any one may be sure that an author who could thus seize the general character of his subject would write something worth reading when he arrives at the details of his task. In fact, the whole journey, as it is usually taken by modern travellers, presents the course of the history in a living parable before us, to which no other journey or pilgrimage can present any parallel. In its successive scenes, as in a mirror, is faithfully reflected the dramatic unity and progress which so remarkably characterises the Sacred History. The primeval world of Egypt is with us, as with the Israelites, the starting-point-the contrast-of all that *Sinai and Palestine in Connection with their History. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, M. A., Canon of Canterbury. London: Murray. 1856. 1856.] Mr. Stanley's Impressions of Egypt. follows. With us, as with them, the Pyramids recede, and the Desert begins, and the wilderness melts into the hills of Palestine, and Jerusalem is the climax of the long ascent, and the consummation of the Gospel History presents itself locally, no less than historically, as the end of the Law and the Prophets. And with us, too, as the glory of Palestine fades away into the common day' of Asia Minor and the Bosphorus, gleams of the Eastern light still continue-first in the Apostolical labours, then, fainter and dimmer, in the beginnings of ecclesiastical history, -Ephe sus, Nicæa, Chalcedon, Constantinople; and the life of European scenery and of Western Christendom completes by its contrast what Egypt and the East had begun. In regular succession at 'sundry' and 'divers' places, no less than in sundry times and divers manners, "God spake in times past to our fathers;' and the local, as well as the historical diversity, is necessary to the ideal richness and completeness of the whole. No part of the volume is more interesting than the introduction, which contains portions of letters written from Egypt. These letters are disjoined from the body of the work, as referring to a country not included in the title of the book; but they relate to a subject that is intimately connected with the history of the children of Israel. Even the outward features of Sinai and Palestine cannot, as Mr. Stanley truly remarks, be properly appreciated without some endeavour to conceive the aspect which the valley of the Nile, with its singular imagery and scenery, offered to the successive generations of the descendants of Jacob. Mr. Stanley has the faculty-partly natural, partly derived from long habit and laborious culture-of painting in a few words the salient features of a landscape, and impressing them on the memory of the reader. Directly he enters the Nile he begins to give us a profusion of happy expressions, not exactly epigrammatic, still less magniloquent, but vigorous because they are prompted by the eye that knows what to see, and uttered in a simple and intelligible manner. The first thing,' he tells us, that struck me, was the size of the Nile. One perceives what a sea-like stream it must have seemed to Greeks and Italians.' Of Cairo he says, that it leaves a 337 deep feeling, that whatever there was of greatness or wisdom in those remote ages and those gigantic monuments, is now the inheritance not of the East, but of the West. The Nile, as it glides between the tombs of the Pharaohs and the city of the Caliphs, is indeed a boundary between the worlds.' The valley of the Nile has often been described, and there is nothing new to be said of it, but the old familiar description seems new when it is so mediately,' he says, above the well given as by Mr. Stanley. Imbrown and blue waters of the broad, calm, lake-like river rises a thick black bank of clod or mud, mostly in terraces. Green-unutterably green-mostly at the top of these banks, though sometimes creeping down to the water's edge, lies the land of Egypt.' At a later period of his journey he speaks of the sound of the ungreased wheels of the Nubian water-works, which in the distance is like the hum of a mosquito. How much,' he says, 'that hum tells you of the state of the country, if you inquire into all its causes. The high banks which prevent the floods, the tropical heats which call for the labour of oxen instead of men, the constant need of water, and the wild costume of the people.' We could find many passages like this, which show that Mr. Stanley travelled with eyes and ears open, and that all he heard and saw had a meaning for him, and may now, through his lively painting, become a part of the mental wealth of his countrymen. Short as it is, Mr. Stanley's description of the ruins of Upper Egypt conveys a more vivid impression than many more extended accounts of that great region of wonders. Rameses, the great conqueror and builder, the scourge of Asia and the second founder of Thebes, seems to have had a peculiar interest for the imaginative traveller; and every time that an occasion arises for the mention of his name, some tribute is paid to the greatness of this glory of the early world. At Ipsambul, the features of Rameses are to be seen magnified to gigantic proportions, and repeated in three different statues. Mr. Stanley studied attentively the countenance of the hero, and tells us that he noticed three peculiarities besides that of profound tranquillity, united perhaps with something of scorn: first, the length of the face, compared with that of most others that one sees in the sculptures; secondly, the curl of the tip of the nose; thirdly, the overlapping and fall of the under-lip. Elsewhere he dwells on the extraordinary contrast presented by the serenity and the savageness of the kings: Rameses, with the placid smile, grasping the shrieking captives by the hair; and Ammon, with the smile no less placid,' giving him the falchion to smite them. It is dangerous, perhaps, to substitute the impression which, without having seen these marble deities, we may conceive they would produce for that which their presence has actually awakened, or we should feel inclined to fancy Mr. Stanley was scarcely correct in saying that the 'whole impression is that gods and men were slow to move, slow to think; but when they did move or think, their work was done with the force and violence of giants.' Is not this to confound the actual with the ideal? Ancient Egyptians worked, not like giants but like men; not with any greater force than the Assyrians or Romans, perhaps not with greater than the followers of Alaric and Attila ; certainly not with greater than those of Cortes or of Clive. But the Egyptians had a profound and. poetical sense of the sublimity of repose; they had also a sense of the awe which vast size always awakens in man, and therefore they made their gods so grand in their solemn stillness, and with features so far beyond the features of men. The majesty and the wonder of Thebes have been too often dwelt on for us to notice at length all that Mr. Stanley has to say of them, but we cannot pass over entirely in silence his eloquent picture of what in characteristic language he calls the tombs of the kings, the Westminster Abbey of Thebes; and the tombs of the princes and priests, its Canterbury Cathedral." Nothing, he tells us, that had ever been said about them had prepared him for their extraordinary grandeur. Two ideas seemed to reign through the various sculptures : First, the endeavour to reproduce, as far as possible, the life of man, so that the mummy of the dead king, whether in his long sleep or on his awakening, might still be encompassed by the old familiar objects; secondly, the conducting the king to the world of death. Endless processions of jackal-headed gods and monstrous forms of genii, good and evil, increasing in number and complexity as the immense granite sarcophagus in which the king was to lie was approached, form the subject of the gorgeous decoration which is now so marvellous a spectacle to modern eyes. It is a curious fact, that although every precaution was taken in the construction of the tombs to disguise the situation of the sarcophagus, and though the tomb was closed up directly the king was buried, in no instance has the mummy been discovered by modern explorers. And yet the tombs themselves remain so fresh, so unaltered, so secure from the ravages of time or man, that they are not so much pages of history to us, as actual portions of the past let into the framework of the history of an age that is farther off from us than the age of Abraham and Isaac. Mr. Stanley points out the significance of these relics in the following observations: To have seen the Tombs of Thebes is to have seen the Egyptians as they lived and moved before the eyes of Mosesis to have seen the utmost display of funereal grandeur which has ever possessed the human mind. To have seen the Royal Tombs is more than this-it is to have seen the whole religion of Egypt unfolded as it appeared to the greatest powers of Egypt, at the most solemn moments of their lives. And this can be explored only on the spot. Only a very small portion of the mythological pictures of the Tombs of the Kings has ever been represented in engravings. The mythology of Egypt, even now, strange to say, can be studied only in the caverns of the Valley of the Kings. After he has passed the Red Sea, Mr. Stanley begins the proper subject of his work. He is in the Peninsula of Sinai. The interest which attaches to this peninsula is neces 1856.] The Mountains of the Tôr. sarily inferior to that which makes the name of Judæa dear to every Christian heart; but the barren desert of Sinai, Mr. Stanley remarks, has this peculiar claim on our attention, that it witnessed the beginning of all that can properly be called history, and that the associations stamped on it by the wanderings of the Jews have not been obliterated or interfered with by the occurrence of any subsequent great events on the same ground. Our readers are probably aware that the exact route taken by the Jews is one of the great antiquarian and topographical puzzles which vex the learned. With his usual quiet sense, Mr. Stanley points out that one chief cause of the difficulty is, that each traveller takes one route only, and naturally wishes to prove that the Israelites wandered in exactly the same direction as he did. The learning requisite to understand the question is so minute, that we will not enter into the results at which Mr. Stanley thinks he may arrive, and gives, not by any means as certainties, but as probabilities, to be pronounced with diffidence. But his general description of the peninsula is so excellent and so suggestive, that we must notice its principal points. Of the three geological elements which comprise the peninsula itself, the first and the most extensive is the northern table-land of limestone, which is known as the Desert of the Tih,' or the Wanderings. This plateau is succeeded by the sandstone mountains which form the first approach to the higher Sinaitic range. A narrow belt of sand divides the table-land from the mountains, and this is the only place in the whole peninsula where sand is to be found. Our notion of a desert is so completely borrowed from the deserts of Africa, that we are apt to imagine that the wanderings of the Israelites took them through interminable wastes of sand. Whatever their other sufferings may have been, they at any rate escaped this. The mountains of the Tôr, as they are called, succeed the outlying hills, which are bordered by the sand; and it was among these mountains, rising in their highest points to the height of 339 more than 9000 feet, that the law was given to Israel. If we could look on these mountains from a point above them, so as to catch their whole configuration, we should see them form themselves into a triangle, skirted by three strips of level ground, from which rugged passes lead into the hills, beginning with a gradual slope, but ending in a staircase of rock, like (to use Mr. Stanley's comparison) the Puertas of the Andalusian table-land. The cluster itself consists of two formations, sandstone and granite or porphyry, the former constituting the northern, the latter the southern division. Sandstone and granite alike lend the strong red hue which, mixed with dark green, gives so remarkable an appearance to the scenery. Here and there long streaks of purple, running from top to bottom, diversify the colouring. Another feature of these mountains, only less peculiar than these singularities of hue, is the infinite complication of jagged peaks and varied ridges. The desolation that pervades them is complete. They are the Alps unclothed,' stripped of vegetation, and without any of those verdure-covered hollows which make bright spots in almost every great range of mountains. Their bareness and some peculiarity in the atmosphere produces a deep stillness and consequent reverbe ration in the human voice, which must be one of the most striking characteristics of Mount Sinai. Mysterious noises are said to be heard from the summits of the higher peaks, and every sound travels to an almost incredible distance. The valleys of this mountain range are the dry water-courses, for which we have no word, as they belong to a scenery so different from that of Europe, and which are therefore generally spoken of under their Arabian name, Wady.' These wadys give to the desert its boundaries, its form, and its means of communication. Clad in a thin coating of vegetation, they offer to the eye of the traveller the only spots of green which he can see, except where the few perennial springs create an oasis. Even this brief sketch of what Mr. Stanley |