The Song of our Syrian Guest | Page 2

night air, and the watch-dog bays drowsily from his kennel at the gate. Good night, fair world; 'tis time to seek repose. Let us first read and meditate upon that delightful chapter, the tenth of St. John, where our blessed Saviour appropriates all these characters of a good shepherd to himself.
"The Land and the Book."

"Faduel Moghabghab," said our guest, laughing as he leaned over the tea-table toward two little maids, vainly trying to beguile their willing and sweetly puckered lips into pronouncing his name. "Faduel Moghabghab," he repeated in syllables, pointing to the card he had passed to them. "Accent the u and drop those g's which your little throats cannot manage," he went on kindly, while the merriment sparkled in his dark eyes, and his milk-white teeth, seen through his black moustache as he laughed, added beauty to his delicate and vivacious face.
He was a man of winsome mind, this Syrian guest of ours, and the spirituality of his culture was as marked as the refinement of his manners. We shall long remember him for the tales told that evening of his home in Ainzehalta on the slope of the Syrian mountains, but longest of all for what he said out of the memories of his youth about a shepherd song.
"It was out of the shepherd life of my country," he remarked, "that there came long ago that sweetest religious song ever written--the Twenty-third Psalm."
After the ripple of his merriment with the children had passed he turned to me with a face now serious and pensive, and said: "Ah, so many things familiar to us are strange to you of America."
"Yes," I answered, "and no doubt because of this we often make mistakes which are more serious than mispronunciation of your modern names."
He smiled pleasantly, then with earnestness said: "So many things in the life of my people, the same now as in the days of old, have been woven into the words of the Bible and into the conceptions of religious ideas as expressed there; you of the Western world, not knowing these things as they are, often misunderstand what is written, or at least fail to get a correct impression from it."
"Tell us about some of these," I ventured, with a parental glance at two listening little faces.
After mentioning several instances, he went on: "And there is the shepherd psalm: I find that it is taken among you as having two parts, the first under the figure of shepherd life, the second turning to the figure of a banquet with the host and the guest."
"Oh, we have talked about that," said my lady of the teacups as she dangled the tea-ball with a connoisseur's fondness, "and we have even said that we wished the wonderful little psalm could have been finished in the one figure of shepherd life."
"It seems to us," I added, wishing to give suitable support to my lady's rather brave declaration of our sense of a literary flaw in the matchless psalm, "it seems to us to lose the sweet, simple melody and to close with strange, heavy chords when it changes to a scene of banquet hospitality. Do you mean that it actually keeps the shepherd figure to the end?"
"Certainly, good friends."
With keen personal interest I asked him to tell us how we might see it as a shepherd psalm throughout. So we listened and he talked, over the cooling teacups.
"It is all, all a simple shepherd psalm," he began. "See how it runs through the round of shepherd life from first word to last."
"With softly modulated voice that had the rhythm of music and the hush of veneration in it, he quoted: "'_The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want_.'"
"There is the opening strain of its music; in that chord is sounded the keynote which is never lost till the plaintive melody dies away at the song's end. All that follows is that thought put in varying light."
I wish it were possible to reproduce here the light in his face and the interchange of tones in his mellow voice as he went on. He talked of how the varied needs of the sheep and the many-sided care of the shepherd are pictured with masterly touch in the short sentences of the psalm.
"Each is distinct and adds something too precious to be merged and lost," he said.
"'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,'--nourishment, rest. 'He leadeth me beside the still waters,'--the scene changes and so does the meaning. You think here of quietly flowing streams; so you get one more picture of rest; but you miss one of the finest scenes in shepherd life and one of the rarest blessings of the soul that is led of God. All through the day's roaming the shepherd keeps one thing in mind.