h--stood before
us. We climbed a toilsome zig-zag through the snow, hurried over the
stones cumbering the top, and all at once the mountains fell away, ridge
below ridge, gashed with tremendous chasms, whose bottoms were lost in
blue vapor, till the last heights, crowned with white Maronite convents,
hung above the sea, whose misty round bounded the vision. I have seen many
grander mountain views, but few so sublimely rugged and broken in their
features. The sides of the ridges dropped off in all directions into sheer
precipices, and the few villages we could see were built like eagles'
nests on the brinks. In a little hollow at our feet was the sacred Forest
of Cedars, appearing like a patch of stunted junipers. It is the highest
speck of vegetation on Lebanon, and in winter cannot be visited, on
account of the snow. The summit on which we stood was about nine thousand
feet above the sea, but there were peaks on each side at least a thousand
feet higher.

We descended by a very steep path, over occasional beds of snow, and
reached the Cedars in an hour and a half. Not until we were within a
hundred yards of the trees, and below their level, was I at all impressed
with their size and venerable aspect. But, once entered into the heart of
the little wood, walking over its miniature hills and valleys, and
breathing the pure, balsamic exhalations of the trees, all the
disappointment rising to my mind was charmed away in an instant There are
about three hundred trees, in all, many of which are of the last century's
growth, but at least fifty of them would be considered grand in any
forest. The patriarchs are five in number, and are undoubtedly as old as
the Christian Era, if not the Age of Solomon. The cypresses in the Garden
of Montezuma, at Chapultepec, are even older and grander trees, but they
are as entire and shapely as ever, whereas these are gnarled and twisted
into wonderful forms by the storms of twenty centuries, and shivered in
some places by lightning. The hoary father of them all, nine feet in
diameter, stands in the centre of the grove, on a little knoll, and
spreads his ponderous arms, each a tree in itself, over the heads of the
many generations that have grown up below, as if giving his last
benediction before decay. He is scarred less with storm and lightning,
than with the knives of travellers, and the marble crags of Lebanon do not
more firmly retain their inscriptions than his stony trunk. Dates of the