Excerpt from Myrtle and Myrrh The stranger at thy gate, hailing from the Orient, holds out to thee a gaunt and tatooed hand. This hand has often made mud-pies from earth that might have once mapped out the stars; or, in a drunken vision, heard the grum blings of a god and made of them a captivating creed: the brain of an ancient Assyrian astron omer; the spine of a Semitic sage; the cheeks of a Jezebel or a St. Takla; the heart of a slave that added beauty and horror to the chariot of a Babylonian king or a Roman conqueror: any or all of these might have besmeared this hand. Wilt thou take it? The hand of a personified illusion, of an exiled dream, of an Oriental who makes himself thy guest. He comes not to preach Buddhism to thee; nor Mohammedanism; nor Babyism: nor any other ism made picturesque and alluring by red caftans, white turbans, blue sashes and amber gris-scented lies. The only message he brings from his vine crowned and pine-girdled Mother to bewitch ing and enriching America is that of love and longing and lacrimal. He came from the Mountains of Lebanon, from under the shadow of the Acropolis of Baalbak, to learn from the Yankees the way to do things - the way to rise and flourish and expand; or, as they put it, the way to get there and be it - from a mundane point of view, of course. It has been observed. However, that the spots of a leopard are irre movable; and so is the lethargy of an Oriental. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.