enlightened.  Even before this time, the contradiction between tradition, and the actual and possible, had appeared to me very striking; and I had often put my private tutors to a non-plus with the sun which stood still on Gibeon, and the moon in the vale of Ajalon, to say nothing of other improbabilities and incongruities.  Every thing of this kind was now awakened; while, in order to master the Hebrew, I occupied myself exclusively with the Old Testament, and studied it, though no longer in Luther’s translation, but in the literal version of Sebastian Schmid, printed under the text, which my father had procured for me.  Here, I am sorry to say, our lessons began to be defective in regard to practice in the language.  Reading, interpreting, grammar, transcribing, and the repetition of words, seldom lasted a full half-hour; for I immediately began to aim at the sense of the matter, and, though we were still engaged in the first book of Moses, to utter several things suggested to me by the later books.  At first the good old man tried to restrain me from such digressions, but at last they seemed to entertain him also.  It was impossible for him to suppress his characteristic cough and chuckle:  and, although he carefully avoided giving me any information that might have compromised himself, my importunity was not relaxed; nay, as I cared more to set forth my doubts than to learn their solution, I grew constantly more vivacious and bold, seeming justified by his deportment.  Yet I could get nothing out of him, except that ever and anon he would exclaim with his peculiar, shaking laugh, “Ah! mad fellow! ah! mad boy!”

Still, my childish vivacity, which scrutinized the Bible on all sides, may have seemed to him tolerably serious and worthy of some assistance.  He therefore referred me, after a time, to the large English biblical work which stood in his library, and in which the interpretation of difficult and doubtful passages was attempted in an intelligent and judicious manner.  By the great labors of German divines the translation had obtained advantages over the original.  The different opinions were cited; and at last a kind of reconciliation was attempted, so that the dignity of the book, the ground of religion, and the human understanding, might in some degree co-exist.  Now, as often as towards the end of the lesson I came out with my usual questions and doubts, so often did he point to the repository.  I took the volume, he let me read, turned over his Lucian; and, when I made any remarks on the book, his ordinary laugh was the only answer to my sagacity.  In the long summer days he let me sit as long as I could read, many times alone; after a time he suffered me to take one volume after another home with me.

Man may turn which way he please, and undertake any thing whatsoever, he will always return to the path which nature has once prescribed for him.  Thus it happened also with me in the present case.  The trouble I took with the language, with the contents of the Sacred Scriptures themselves, ended at last in producing in my imagination a livelier picture of that beautiful and famous land, its environs and its vicinities, as well as of the people and events by which that little spot of earth was made glorious for thousands of years.