Excerpt from Heroines of the Crusades Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, whether glorious in the beauty of her first temple, and the excellent wisdom of her philosopher king, or veiled in the darkness of that fatal eclipse in which the solemn scenes of Calvary consummated her glory and shame, has occupied a position in the great drama of human events, more interesting and important than any other city on the globe. But Jerusalem, in the gloom of that moral night which gathered over the nations after the fall of the western Empire of the Romans, exerted a greater influence upon the minds of men than at any for mer period. The insulting Moslem felt a degree of veneration for the splendid ruins over which he walked with all a conqueror's pride - the African anchorite left his solitary hermitage to weep upon Mount Olivet - the European adventurer wreathed his stafi' with the branch ing palm from her holy hills - the despairing Jew sat in sackcloth at her fallen gates, and even the mingled barbarians of the East united with the Christian to revere the spot where art achieved its proudest monument, and poetry found the theme of its sublimest song. 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.