PREFACE. I HERE offer my Travels in the East to friendly readers. The great sympathy I myself received during my pilgrimage, inclines me to hope that these reminiscences will also attract favourable regard. The very aspect of my book proves that the tone of its communications is not addressed to the learned: my heart rather than my head has dictated them. He who has travelled in the East, possesses at least all that a Swiss has in his native mountains; if he have them not before his eyes, he bears them in his heart. I say that the East attracts the traveller at least to this extent; for in reality it enchains him far more, provided he brings a right mind and spirit to behold the memorials which it preserves of the origin of Christianity and of the sacred past history of mankind. The eye which I myself brought to the contemplation of the East, will be readily detected in what I have written. The impressions which personal inspection made upon me, it has been my chief object here to compress into a permanent form, as an enduring memorial. It is to be regretted that a work like mine necessarily puts the first person to a certain extent in the foreground; but I conceived that an unreserved outpouring of the heart, an open ingenuousness of narrative which should place writer and reader as it were in immediate contact, would be appreciated by many. Questions indicative of hearty sympathy have often been put to me by unlearned persons, as to the scope and tendency of the |