Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/88

own welfare, the very soil disappears under his feet. So has it been now through many dreary centuries; and here has been accomplished the warning—that the sins of the fathers are visited, not only upon the children to the third and fourth generation; but upon their remotest descendants, and to their successors, who may be masters of the land.

The desolations of Palestine have been sensibly increased, even within the memory of man;—and unquestionably so within periods that are authentically known to history. Those who have visited Palestine, at intervals of fifteen or twenty years, have forcibly received this impression from the aspect of its surface, as well as from the appearance of the people, that decay is still in progress: a ruthless and rapacious rule, dreading and hating reform, withers the industry—such as it might be—of the people, and makes the land a fit roaming ground for the Bedouin marauder. A ten years of British rule, and a million or two of British capital, might yet make this land "blossom as the rose:" the wilderness and parched land how should they be made glad for such a visitation!

Yet beside the social and political causes of decay, some purely physical influences have been taking effect upon Palestine, as upon all the countries that skirt the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Within the lapse of what is called historic time, Libyan wastes have become far more arid than once they were, and, in consequence, they have acquired a