The Penny Press

The Splendor of Damascus.-Damascus is the oldest city in the world. Tyre and Sidon have crumbled on the shore; Baalbec is a ruin; Palmyra is buried in the sands of the desert; Ninevah and Babylon have disappeared from the Tigris and Euphrates: Damascus remains what it was before the days of Abraham-a center of trade and travel-an island of verdure in a desert-'a predestined capital,' with martial and sacred associations extending through more than thirty centuries. It was "near Damascus" that Saul of Tarsus saw the "light from Heaven above the brightness of the sun;" the street which is called Straight, in which it was said "he prayeth," still runs through the city. The caravan comes and goes as it did a thousand years ago; there are still the sheik, the ass and the water-wheel; the merchant of the Euphrates and of the Mediterranean still "occupy" these "with the multitude of their waters." The city which Mahomet surveyed from a neighboring height, and was afraid to enter, because it is given to man to have but one Paradise, and for his part he was resolved not to have it in this world, is to this day what Julian called "the eye of the East," as it was in the time of Isaiah, "the head of Syria." From Damascus came the damson, our blue plum, and the delicious apricot of Portugal, called damasco; damask, our beautiful fabric of cotton and silk, with vines and flowers raised upon a smooth bright ground; the damask rose, introduced into England in time of Henry the VIII; the Damascus blade, so famous the world over for its keen edge and wonderful elasticity, the secret of whose manufacture was lost when Tamerlane carried off the arts into Persia; and that beautiful art of inlaying wood and steel with silver and gold, a kind of Mosaic engraving and sculpture united-called Damaskeening, with which boxes and bureaus, and swords, and guns are ornamented. It is still a city of flowers and bright waters; the streams from Lebanon, the "rivers of Damascus," the "rivers of gold," still murmur and sparkle in the wilderness of "Syrian gardens."