They do so
by association of ideas by the accreted memories of our race
enwrapping connotation around a word, a name--say the name
_Jerusalem,_ or the name _Sion_:
And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Sion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
her cunning.
It must be known to you, Gentlemen, that these words can affect
men to tears who never connect them in thought with the actual
geographical Jerusalem; who connect it in thought merely with a
quite different native home from which they are exiles. Here and
there some one man may feel a similar emotion over Landor's
Tanagra, think not I forget....
But the word Jerusalem will strike twenty men twentyfold more
poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to
his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them:
not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond
the landscape seen from its window; its connotation includes not
only what the word 'Rome' has meant, and ever must mean, to
thousands on thousands setting eyes for the first time on _The
City_: but it holds, too, some hint of the New Jerusalem, the
city of twelve gates before the vision of which St John fell
prone:
Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem,
Would God I were in thee!
Thy Gardens and thy gallant walks
Continually are green:
There grows such sweet and pleasant flowers
As nowhere else are seen.
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