happens) express themselves, more or less, in varying relations to the
great accidents and powers of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria--
those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears
of corn--that _must_ be summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm
Sunday (a festival in the English church) troubled me like an anthem.
"Sunday!" what was _that_? That was the day of peace which masked another
peace deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were
they? _That_ was an equivocal word; palms, in the sense of trophies,
expressed the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, expressed the
pomps of summer. Yet still even this explanation does not suffice; it was
not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest
below all rest and of ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was
also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time
and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm Sunday
came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to Jerusalem.
What then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be the _omphalos_ (navel)
or physical centre of the earth? Why should _that_ affect me? Such a
pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for a Grecian
city; and both pretensions had become ridiculous, as the figure of the
planet became known. Yes; but if not of the earth, yet of mortality;
for earth's tenant, Jerusalem, had now become the _omphalos_ and
absolute centre. Yet how? There, on the contrary, it was, as we infants
understood, that mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but,
for that very reason, there it was that mortality had opened its very
gloomiest crater. There it was, indeed, that the human had risen on
wings from the grave; but, for that reason, there also it was that the
divine had been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not
rise before the greater should submit to eclipse. Summer, therefore,
had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antagonism,
but also as a phenomenon brought into intricate relations with death