Alphonse de Lamartine 
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land [PDF ebook] 
Comprising Recollections, Sketches, and Reflections Made During a Tour in the East

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The Reader is here presented neither with an elaborate work nor with a journal of travels: it was never my intention to write either the one or the other. A book, I should rather say a poem, upon the East, we already possess in M. de Chateaubriand’s Itinerary. That accomplished writer and great poet passed but transiently over the land of miracles, yet has his genius imprinted for ever the traces of his steps upon the dust which so many centuries have swept. He sought Jerusalem in the double character of pilgrim and of knight, – the Bible, the Gospel, and the Crusades in his hand: I visited it only as a poet and philosopher; and I am returned with the emotions of my heart deeply awakened, and my mind enlightened by sublime and awful lessons. The reflections I there made on religion, history, manners, traditions, and the various phases of human nature, are not lost upon me. Those perceptions which expand the narrow horizon of thought – which exercise the reasoning faculties upon the great problems of religion and history – which compel man to retrace his steps, to scrutinize his convictions by the word of truth, to imbibe new ones, and to reform such as are erroneous; that secret but ennobling education of thought, by thought, by places, by facts – by comparison of age with age, of habits with habits, of creeds with creeds, – nothing of all this is lost upon the poetical and philosophical traveler; they are the elements of his future poetry and philosophy. When he has collected, classed, arranged, cleared up, and recapitulated the innumerable impressions, images, and thoughts which the earth and men respond to those who interrogate them; when he has matured his mind and his convictions, – he speaks in his turn, and gives his ideas, good or evil, just or false, to his generation, perhaps in the shape of a poem, or it may be in a philosophical guise. He speaks his word, – that word which every man endowed with reflection is called upon to speak. Such a moment may one d