it stands a pine-tree,
and beside it a rude bulk of stone; where stood these great
captains in turn, before they took Jerusalem. Then the wall runs
on till it comes to the great Damascus Gate, graven I know not
why with great roses in a style wholly heraldic and occidental,
and in no way likely to remind us of the rich roses of Damascus;
though their name has passed into our own English tongue and tradition,
along with another word for the delicate decoration of the sword.
But at the first glance, at any rate, it is hard to believe that
the roses on the walls are not the Western roses of York or Lancaster,
or that the swords which guarded them were not the straight swords
of England or of France. Doubtless a deeper and more solemn memory
ought to return immediately to the mind where that gate looks down
the great highway; as if one could see, hung over it in the sky for ever,
the cloud concealing the sunburst that broods upon the road to Damascus.
But I am here only confessing the facts or fancies of my first impression;
and again the fancy that came to me first was not of any such
alien or awful things. I did not think of damask or damascene
or the great Arabian city or even the conversion of St. Paul.
I thought of my own little house in Buckinghamshire, and how the edge
of the country town where it stands is called Aylesbury End,
merely because it is the corner nearest to Aylesbury.
That is what I mean by saying that these ancient customs are more
rational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity.
When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerk
living there does not set out from his villa with the cheerful hope
of finding the road lead him to Pretoria. But the man leaving
Aylesbury End does know it would lead him to Aylesbury; and the man
going out at the Damascus Gate did know it would lead him to Damascus.
And the same is true of the next and last of the old entrances,
the Jaffa Gate in the east; but when I saw that I saw something
else as well.

I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famous
shrine which is called the Gate of Humility; but indeed in this sense
all gates are gates of humility, and especially gates of this kind.
Any one who has ever looked at a landscape under an archway
will know what I mean, when I say that it sharpens a pleasure
with a strange sentiment of privilege. It adds to the grace
of distance something that makes it not only a grace