Behind me I left an old, decrepit world;
religions dead and dying; calm tyrannies expiring in silence; women
hushed and swathed, and turned into waxen dolls; love flown, and in
its stead mere royal and "paradise" pleasures. Before me there
waited glad bustle and strife; love itself, an emulous game;
religion, a cause and a controversy, well smitten and well
defended; men governed by reasons and suasion of speech; wheels
going, steam buzzing--a mortal race, and a slashing pace, and the
devil taking the hindmost--taking ME, by Jove (for that was my
inner care), if I lingered too long upon the difficult pass that
leads from thought to action.
I descended and went towards the west.
The group of cedars remaining on this part of the Lebanon is held
sacred by the Greek Church on account of a prevailing notion that
the trees were standing at a time when the temple of Jerusalem was
built. They occupy three or four acres on the mountain's side, and
many of them are gnarled in a way that implies great age, but
except these signs I saw nothing in their appearance or conduct
that tended to prove them contemporaries of the cedars employed in
Solomon's Temple.
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