There is no reason to doubt that these reservoirs were the works
of Solomon. This secluded valley, then, was once the scene of his
imaginative and delicious life. Here were his pleasure gardens; these
slopes were covered with his fantastic terraces, and the high places
glittered with his pavilions. The fountain that supplied these treasured
waters was perhaps the 'sealed fountain,' to which he compared his
bride; and here was the garden palace where the charming Queen of Sheba
vainly expected to pose the wisdom of Israel, as she held at a distance
before the most dexterous of men the two garlands of flowers, alike in
form and colour, and asked the great king, before his trembling court,
to decide which of the wreaths was the real one.
They are gone, they are vanished, these deeds of beauty and these words
of wit! The bright and glorious gardens of the tiaraed poet and the
royal sage, that once echoed with his lyric voice, or with the startling
truths of his pregnant aphorisms, end in this wild and solitary valley,
in which with folded arms and musing eye of long abstraction, Tancred
halts in his ardent pilgrimage, nor can refrain from asking himself,
'Can it, then, be true that all is vanity?'
Why, what, is this desolation? Why are there no more kings whose words
are the treasured wisdom of countless ages, and the mention of whose
name to this moment thrills the heart of the Oriental, from the waves of
the midland ocean to the broad rivers of the farthest Ind? Why are there
no longer bright-witted queens to step out of their Arabian palaces
and pay visits to the gorgeous 'house of the forest of Lebanon,' or
to where Baalbec, or Tadmor in the wilderness, rose on those plains now
strewn with the superb relics of their inimitable magnificence?
And yet some flat-nosed Frank, full of bustle and puffed up with
self-conceit (a race spawned perhaps in the morasses of some Northern
forest hardly yet cleared), talks of Progress! Progress to what, and
from whence? Amid empires shrivelled into deserts, amid the wrecks of
great cities, a single column or obelisk of which nations import for
the prime ornament of their mud-built capitals, amid arts forgotten,
commerce annihilated, fragmentary literatures and populations destroyed,
the European talks of progress, because, by an ingenious application
of some scientific acquirements, he has established a society which has
mistaken comfort for civilisation.
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