ABSTRACT
The Land and the Book, derives its greatest significance from Thomson's attempt to bring the religiously inclined reader in the United States into an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual relation with the sites that he describes. This quality both separates Thomson's account from the others in this chapter and causes it to anticipate the most ambitious of American responses to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century, Herman Melville's Clarel. William Prime establishes his credentials as a full-fledged sentimentalist in the opening chapter, which is portentously titled "Nunc Dimittis Domine". The American accounts of the Holy Land that became a standard against which the experience of others could be measured were those of the devout evangelical Protestants who went as missionaries, archaeologists, biblical commentators, and, frequently, lachrymose tourists. The way in which American evangelical Protestant travelers shape the responses that their compatriots have to the Holy Land is in their curious mix of sentimental piety and empiricist skepticism.
