black fruit on the gray rock. On our right, the desert of St. John, where formerly the voice was heard crying in the wilderness,' sank like an abyss in the midst of five or six black mountains, through the openings of which, the sea of Egypt, overspread with a dark cloud, could still be discerned. On the left, and near the eye, was an old tower, placed on the top of a projecting eminence; other ruins, apparently of an ancient aqueduct, descended from that tower, overgrown with verdure, now in the sere leaf; that tower is Modin, the stronghold and tomb of the last heroes of sacred story, the Maccabees. We left behind us the ruins, resplendent with the first rays of the morning-rays, not blended as in Europe in a confused and vague illumination, but darting like arrows of fire tinted with various colours, issuing from a dazzling centre, and diverging over the whole heavens as they expand. Some were of blue, slightly silvered, others of pure white, some of tender rose-hue, melting into gray; many of burning fire, like the coruscations of a flaming conflagration. All were distinct, yet all united in one harmonious whole, forming a resplendent arch in the heavens, encircling, and issuing from a centre of fire. In proportion as the day advanced, the brilliant light of these separate rays was gradually dimmed-or rather, they were blended together, and composed the colourless light of day. Then the moon, which still shone overhead, 'paled her ineffectual fire,' and melted away in the general illumination of the heavens.

continent only by a narrow chaussée of shining | places cleared out in the wilderness. Fig sand, borne hither by the winds of Egypt. trees, with their tops withered or shivered by Tyre, now called Sour by the Arabs, is situated the blasts, often edged the vines, and cast their at the extremity of this peninsula, and seems, at a distance, to rise out of the waves. The modern town, at first sight, has a gay and smiling appearance; but a nearer approach dispels the illusion, and exhibits only a few hundred crumbling and half-deserted houses, where the Arabs, in the evening, assemble to shelter their flocks which have browsed in the narrow plain.__Such is all that now remains of the mighty Tyre. It has neither a harbour to the sea, nor a road to the land; the prophecies have long been accomplished in regard to it. "We moved on in silence, buried in the contemplation of the dust of an empire which we trod. We followed a path in the middle of the plain of Tyre, between the town and the hills of gray and naked rock which Lebanon has thrown down towards the sea. We arrived abreast of the city, and touched a mound of sand which appears the sole remaining rampart to prevent it from being overwhelmed by the waves of the ocean or the desert. I thought of the prophecies, and called to mind some of the eloquent denunciations of Ezekiel. As I was making these reflections, some objects, black, gigantic, and motionless, appeared upon the summit of one of the overhanging cliffs of Lebanon which there advanced far into the plain. They resembled five black statues, placed on a rock as their huge pedestal. At first we thought it was five Bedouins, who were there stationed to fire upon us from their inaccessible heights; but when we were at the distance of fifty yards, we beheld one of them open its enormous wings, and flap them against its sides with a sound like the unfurling of a sail. We then perceived that they were five eagles of the largest species I have ever seen, either in the Alps or our museums. They made no attempt to move when we approached; they seemed to regard themselves as kings of the desert, looked on Tyre as an appanage which belonged to them, and whither they were about to return. Nothing more supernatural ever met my eyes; I could almost suppose that behind them I saw the terrible figure of Ezekiel, the poet of vengeance, pointing to the devoted city which the divine wrath had overwhelmed with destruction. The discharge of a few muskets made them rise from their rock but they showed no disposition to move from their ominous perch, and, soon returning, floated over our heads, regardless of the shots fired at them, as if the eagles of God were beyond the reach of human injury." -(II. 8-9.)

Jerusalem was a subject to awaken all our author's enthusiasm, and call forth all his descriptive powers. The first approach to it has exercised the talents of many writers in prose and verse; but none has drawn it in such graphic and brilliant colours as our author:

"We ascended a mountain ridge strewed over with enormous gray rocks piled one on another as if by human hands. Here and there a few stunted vines, yellow with the coour of autumn, crept along the soil in a few

"After having ascended a second ridge, more lofty and naked than the former, the horizon suddenly opens to the right, and presents a view of all the country which extends between the last summits of Judea and the mountains of Arabia. It was already flooded with the increasing light of the morning; but beyond the piles of gray rock which lay in the foreground, nothing was distinctly visible but a dazzling space, like a vast sea, interspersed with a few islands of shade, which stood forth in the brilliant surface. On the shores of that imaginary ocean, a little to the left, and about a league distant, the sun shone with uncommon brilliancy on a massy tower, a lofty minaret, and some edifices, which crowned the summit of a low hill of which you could not see the bottom. Soon the points of other minarets, a few loopholed walls, and the dark summits of several domes, which successively came into view, and fringed the descending slope of the hill, announced a city. It was JERUSALEM, and every one of the party, without addressing a word to the guides or to each other, enjoyed in silence the entrancing spectacle. We rested our horses to contemplate that mysterious and dazzling apparition; but when we moved on, it was soon snatched from our view; for as we descended the hill, and plunged into the deep and profound valley which lay at its feet, we lost sight of the holy city, and were surrounded only by the solitude and desolation of the desert.”—(II. 163—165)

stone, fallen from the top of the wall which obstructed its course. Beautiful sculptures were half concealed in the limpid stream. We passed the rivulet by an arch formed by these fallen remains, and mounting a narrow breach, were soon lost in admiration of the scene which surrounded us. At every step a fresh exclamation of surprise broke from our lips. Every one of the stones of which that wall was composed was from eight to ten feet in length, by five or six in breadth, and as much in height. They rest, without cement, one upon the other, and almost all bear the mark of Indian or Egyptian sculpture. At a single glance, you see that these enormous stones are not placed in their original sitethat they are the precious remains of temples of still more remote antiquity, which were made use of to encircle this colony of Grecian and Roman citizens.

The environs of Jerusalem are described with equal force by the same master-hand :"The general aspect of the environs of Jerusalem may be described in a few words. Mountains without shade, and valleys without water-the earth without verdure, rocks without grandeur. Here and there a few blocks of gray stone start up out of the dry and fissured earth, between which, beneath the shade of an old fig-tree, a gazelle or a hyæna are occasionally seen to emerge from the fissures of the rock. A few plants or vines creep over the surface of that gray and parched soil; in the distance, is occasionally seen a grove of olive-trees, casting a shade over the arid side of the mountain-the mouldering walls and towers of the city appearing from afar on the summit of Mount Sion. Such is the general character of the country. The sky is ever pure, bright, and cloudless; never does even the slightest film of mist obscure the purple tint of evening and morning. On the side of Arabia, a wide gulf opens amidst the black ridges, and presents a vista of the shining surface of the Dead Sea, and the violet summits of the mountains of Moab. Rarely is a breath of air heard to murmur, in the fissures of the rocks, or among the branches of the aged olives; not a bird sings, nor an insect chirps in the waterless furrows. Silence reigns universally, in the city, in the roads, in the fields. Such was Jerusalem during all the time that we spent within its walls. Not a sound ever met our ears, but the neighing of the horses, who grew impatient under the burning rays of the sun, or who furrowed the earth with their feet, as they stood picketed round our camp, mingled occasionally with the crying of the hour from the minarets, or the mournful cadences of the Turks as they accompanied the dead to their cemeteries. Jerusalem, to which the world hastens to visit a sepulchre, is itself a vast tomb of a people; but it is a tomb without cypresses, without inscriptions, without monuments, of which they have broken the gravestones, and the ashes of which appear to cover the earth which surrounds it with mourn-around that platform were a series of lesser ing, silence and sterility. We cast our eyes back frequently from the top of every hill which we passed on this mournful and desolate region, and at length we saw for the last time, the crown of olives which surmounts the Mount of the same name, and which long rises above the horizon after you have lost sight of the town itself. At length it also sank beneath the rocky screen, and disappeared like the chaplets of flowers which we throw on a sepulchre.”—(II. 275—276.)

From Jerusalem he made an expedition to Balbec in the desert, which produced the same impression upon him that it does upon all

"When we reached the summit of the breach, our eyes knew not to what object first to turn. On all sides were gates of marble of prodigious height and magnitude; windows or niches, fringed with the richest friezes; fallen pieces of cornices, of entablatures, or capitals, thick as the dust beneath our feet; magnificent vaulted roofs above our heads; everywhere a chaos of confused beauty, the remains of which lay scattered about, or piled on each other in endless variety. So prodigious was the accumulation of architectural remains, that it defies all attempts at classification, or conjecture of the kind of buildings to which the greater part of them had belonged. After passing through this scene of ruined magnificence, we reached an inner wall, which we also ascended; and from its summit the view of the interior was yet more splendid. Of much greater extent, far more richly decorated than the outer circle, it presented an immense platform in the form of a long rectangle, the level surface of which was frequently broken by the remains of still more elevated pavements, on which temples to the sun, the object of adoration at Balbec, had been erected. All

temples-or chapels, as we should call them— decorated with niches, admirably engraved, and loaded with sculptured ornaments to a degree that appeared excessive to those who had seen the severe simplicity of the Parthenon or the Coliseum. But how prodigious the accumulation of architectural riches in the middle of an eastern desert! Combine in imagination the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Coliseum at Rome, of Jupiter Olympius and the Acropolis at Athens, and you will yet fall short of that marvellous assemblage of admirable edifices and sculptures. Many of the temples rest on columns seventy feet in height, and seven feet in diameter, yet composed only of two or three blocks of stone, so perfectly joined together that to this day you can barely discern the lines of their junction. Silence is the only language which befits man when words are inadequate to convey his impressions. We remained mute with admiration, gazing on the eternal ruins.

"The shades of night overtook us while we yet rested in amazement at the scene by which «

and spiritual objects, the more complete subjugation of sense, the enlarged perception of the useful and the beautiful, been in proportion to the extended facilities given to the great body of the people? Alas! the fact is just the reverse. Balbec was a mere station in the desert, without territory, harbour, or subjects maintained solely by the commerce of the East with Europe which flowed through its walls. Yet Balbec raised, in less than a century, a more glorious pile of structures devoted to religious and lofty objects, than London, Paris, and St. Petersburg united can now boast. The Decapolis was a small and remote mountain district of Palestine, not larger in proportion to the Roman, than Morayshire is in proportion to the British empire; yet it contained, as its name indicates, and as their remains still attest, ten cities, the least considerable of which, Gebora, contains, as Buck

we were surrounded. One by one they enve- | creased direction of the popular mind to lofty loped the columns in their obscurity, and added a mystery the more to that magical and mysterious work of time and man. We appeared, as compared with the gigantic mass and long duration of these monuments, as the swallows which nestle a season in the crevices of the capitals, without knowing by whom, or for whom, they have been constructed. The thoughts, the wishes, which moved these masses, are tc is unknown. The dust of marble which we tread beneath our feet knows more of it than we do, but it cannot tell us what it has seen; and in a few ages the generations which shall come in their turn to visit our monuments, will ask, in like manner, wherefore we have built and engraved. The works of man survive his thought. Movement is the law of the human mind; the definite is the dream of his pride and his ignorance. God is a limit which appears ever to recede as humanity approaches him; we are ever advanc-ingham tells us in his Travels beyond the Jordan, ing, and never arrive. This great Divine Figure which man from his infancy is ever striving to reach, and to imprison in his structures raised by hands, for ever enlarges and expands; it outsteps the narrow limits of temples, and leaves the altars to crumble into dust; and calls man to seek for it where alone it resides in thought, in intelligence, in virtue, in nature, in infinity.”—(II. 39, 46, 47.)

the ruins of more sumptuous edifices than any city in the British islands, London itself not excepted, can now boast. It was the same all over the east, and in all the southern provinces of the Roman empire. Whence has arisen this astonishing disproportion between the great things done by the citizens in ancient and in modern times, when in the latter the means of enlarged cultivation have been so immeasurably extended? It is in vain to say, it is because we have more social and domestic happiness, and our wealth is devoted to these objects, not external embellishment. Social and domestic happiness are in the direct, not in the inverse ratio of gene

This passage conveys an idea of the peculiar style, and perhaps unique charm, of Lamartine's work. It is the mixture of vivid painting with moral reflection-of nature with sentiment-of sensibility to beauty, with gratitude to its Author, which constitutes its great attrac-ral refinement and the spread of intellectual tion. Considering in what spirit the French intelligence. The domestic duties are better Revolution was cradled, and from what infide- nourished in the temple than in the gin-shop; lity it arose, it is consoling to see such senti- the admirers of sculpture will make better ments conceived and published among them. fathers and husbands than the lovers of whisky. True they are not the sentiments of the major- Is it that we want funds for such undertakings? ity, at least in towns; but what then? The Why, London is richer than ever Rome was; majority is ever guided by the thoughts of the the commerce of the world, not of the eastern great, not in its own but a preceding age. It caravans, flows through its bosom. The sums is the opinions of the great among our grand- annually squandered in Manchester and Glasfathers that govern the majority at this time; gow on intoxicating liquors, would soon make our great men will guide our grandsons. If them rival the eternal structures of Tadmor we would foresee what a future age is to and Palmyra. Is it that the great bulk of our think, we must observe what a few great men people are unavoidably chained by their chaare now thinking. Voltaire and Rousseau racter and climate to gross and degrading enhave ruled France for two generations; the joyments? Is it that the spreading of knowday of Chateaubriand and Guizot and Lamar-ledge, intelligence, and free institutions, only tine will come in due time. confirms the sway of sensual gratification; and But the extraordinary magnitude of these that a pure and spiritual religion tends only ruins in the middle of an Asiatic wilderness, to strengthen the fetters of passion and selfsuggests another consideration. We are per-ishness? Is it that the inherent depravity of petually speaking of the march of intellect, the vast spread of intelligence, the advancing civilization of the world; and in some respect our boasts are well founded. Certainly, in one particular, society has made a mighty step in advance. The abolition of domestic slavery has emancipated the millions who formerly toiled in bondage; the art of printing has multiplied an hundred fold the reading and think ing world. Our opportunities, therefore, have been prodigiously enlarged; our means of elevation are tenfold what they were in ancient times. But has our elevation itself kept pace with these enlarged means? Has the in

the human heart appears the more clearly as man is emancipated from the fetters of authority: must we go back to early ages for noble and elevated motives of action; is the spread of freedom but another word for the extension of brutality? God forbid that so melancholy a doctrine should have any foundation in human nature! We mention the facts, and leave it to future ages to discover their solution : contenting ourselves with pointing out to our self-applauding countrymen how much they have to do before they attain the level of their advantages, or justify the boundless blessings which Providence has bestowed upon them.

The plain of Troy, seen by moonlight, furnishes the subject of one of our author's most striking passages.

ror;

"It is midnight: the sea is calm as a mirthe vessel floats motionless on the resplendent surface. On our left, Tenedos rises above the waves, and shuts out the view of the open sea; on our right, and close to us, stretched out like a dark bar, the low shore and indented coasts of TROr. The full moon, which rises behind the snow-streaked summit of Mount Ida, sheds a serene and doubtful light over the summits of the mountains, the hills, the plain; its extending rays fall upon the sea, and reach the shadow of our brig, forming a bright path which the shades do not venture to approach. We can discern the tumuli, which tradition still marks as the tombs of Hector and Patroclus. The full moon, slightly tinged with red, which discloses the undulations of the hills, resembles the bloody buckler of Achilles; no light is to be seen on the coast, but a distant twinkling, lighted by the shepherds on Mount Ida-not a sound is to be heard but the flapping of the sail on the mast, and the slight creaking of the mast itself; all seems dead, like the past, in that deserted land. Seated on the forecastle, I see that shore, those mountains, those ruins, those tombs, rise like the ghost of the departed world, reappear from the bosom of the sea with shadowy form, by the rays of the star of night, which sleep on the hills, and disappear as the moon recedes behind the summits of the mountains. It is a beautiful additional page in the poems of Homer, the end of all history and of all poetry! Unknown. tombs, ruins without a certain name; the earth naked and dark, but imperfectly lighted by the immortal luminaries; new spectators passing by the old coast, and repeating for the thousandth time the common epitaph of mortality! Here lies an empire, here a town, here a people, here a hero! God alone is great, and the thought which seeks and adores him alone is imperishable upon earth. I feel no desire to make a nearer approach in daylight to the doubtful remains of the ruins of Troy. I prefer that nocturnal apparition which allows the thought to repeople those deserts, and sheds over them only the distant light of the moon and of the poetry of Homer. And what concerns me Troy, its heroes, and its gods! That leaf of the heroic world is turned for ever!"-(II. 248-250.)

What a magnificent testimonial to the genius of Homer, written in a foreign tongue, two thousand seven hundred years after his death! The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus have, from the dawn of letters, exercised the descriptive talents of the greatest historians of modern Europe. The truthful chronicle of Villehardouin, and the eloquent pictures of Gibbon and Sismondi of the siege of Constantinople, will immediately occur to every scholar. The following passage, however, will show that no subject can be worn out when it is handled by the pen of genius:

of the seraglio, which prolongs those of the city, and form at the extremity of the hill which sup ports the proud Stamboul, the angle which separates the sea of Marmora from the canal of the Bosphorus, and the harbour of the Golden Horn. It is there that God and man, nature and art, have combined to form the most marvellous spectacle which the human eye can behold. I uttered an involuntary cry when the magnificent panorama opened upon my sight; I forgot for ever the bay of Naples and all its enchantments; to compare any thing to that marvellous and graceful combination would be an injury to the fairest work of creation

"The walls which support the circular terraces of the immense gardens of the seraglio were on our left, with their base perpetually washed by the waters of the Bosphorus, blue and limpid as the Rhone at Geneva; the terraces which rise one above another to the palace of the sultana, the gilded cupolas of which rose above the gigantic summits of the planetree and the cypress, were themselves clothed with enormous trees, the trunks of which overhang the walls, while their branches, overspreading the gardens, spread a deep shadow even far into the sea, beneath the protection of which the panting rowers repose from their toil. These stately groups of trees are from time to time interrupted by palaces, pavilions, kiosks, gilded and sculptured domes, or batteries of cannon. These maritime palaces form part of the seraglio. You see occasionally through the muslin curtains the gilded roofs and sumptuous cornices of those abodes of beauty. At every step, elegant Moorish fountains fall from the higher parts of the gardens, and murmur in marble basins, from whence, before reaching the sea, they are conducted in little cascades to refresh the passengers. As the vessel coasted the walls, the prospect expanded-the coast of Asia appeared, and the mouth of the Bosphorus, properly so called, began to open between hills, on one side of dark green, on the other of smiling verdure, which seemed variegated by all the colours of the rainbow. The smiling shores of Asia, distant about a mile, stretched out to our right, surmounted by lofty hills, sharp at the top, and clothed to the summit with dark forests, with their sides varied by hedge-rows, villas, orchards, and gardens. Deep precipitous ravines occasionally descended on this side into the sea, overshadowed by huge overgrown oaks, the branches of which dipped into the water. Further on still, on the Asiatic side, an advanced headland projected into the waves, covered with white houses-it was Scutari, with its vast white barracks, its resplendent mosques, its animated quays, forming a vast city. Further still, the Bosphorus, like a deeply imbedded river, opened between opposing mountains-the advancing promontories and receding bays of which, clothed to the water's edge with forests, exhibited a confused assemblage of masts of vessels, shady groves, noble palaces, hanging gardens, and tranquil havens.

"It was five in the morning, I was standing on deck; we made sail towards the mouth of the Bosphorus, skirting the walls of Constan- "The harbour of Constantinople is not, protinople. After half an hour's navigation | perly speaking, a port. It is rather a great through ships at anchor, we touched the walls river like the Thames, shut in on either side

by hills covered with houses, and covered by | Mussulmen, and descend from the heights of innumerable lines of ships lying at anchor Pera to the shores of the sea. No one evet along the quays. Vessels of every description are to be seen there, from the Arabian bark, the prow of which is raised, and darts along like the ancient galleys, to the ship of the line, with three decks, and its sides studded with brazen mouths. Multitudes of Turkish barks circulate through that forest of masts, serving the purpose of carriages in that maritime city, and disturb, in their swift progress through the waves, clouds of albatros, which, like beautiful white pigeons, rise from the sea on their approach, to descend and repose again on the unruffled surface. It is impossible to count the vessels which lie on the water from the Seraglio point to the suburb of Eyoub and the delicious valley of the Sweet Waters. The Thames at London exhibits nothing comparable to it."-(II. 262-265.)

passes at that hour: you would suppose your. self an hundred miles from the capital, if a confused hum, wafted by the wind, was not occasionally heard, which speedily died away among the branches of the cypress. These sounds weakened by distance; the songs of the sailors in the vessels; the stroke of the oars in the water; the drums of the military bands in the barracks; the songs of the women who lulled their children to sleep; the cries of the Muetzlim who, from the summits of the minarets, called the faithful to evening prayers; the evening gun which boomed across the Bosphorus, the signal of repose to the fleetall these sounds combined to form one confused murmur, which strangely contrasted with the perfect silence around me, and produced the deepest impression. The seraglio, with its vast peninsula, dark with plane-trees and cypresses, stood forth like a promontory of forests between the two seas which slept beneath my eyes. The moon shone on the numerous kiosks; and the old walls of the palace of Amurath stood forth like huge rocks from the obscure gloom of the plane-trees. Before me was the scene, in my mind was the recollection, of all the glorious and sinister events which had there taken place. The impression was the strongest, the most overwhelming, which a sensitive mind could receive. All was there mingled-man and God, society and nature, mental agitation, the melancholy repose of thought. I know not whether I participated in the great movement of associated beings who enjoy or suffer in that mighty assemblage, or in that nocturnal slumber of the elements, which murmured thus, and raised the mind above the cares of cities and empires into the bosom of nature and of God."-(III. 283, 284.)

"Beautiful as the European side of the Bosphorus is, the Asiatic is infinitely more striking. It owes nothing to man, but every thing to nature. There is neither a Buyukdéré nor a Therapia; nor palaces of ambassadors, nor an Armenian nor Frank city; there is nothing but mountains with glens which separate them; little valleys enamelled with green, which lie at the foot of the overhanging rocks; torrents which enliven the scene with their foam; forests which darken it by their shade, or dip their boughs in the waves; a variety of forms, of tints, and of foliage, which the pencil of the painter is alike unable to represent or the pen of the poet to describe. A few cottages perched on the summit of projecting rocks, or sheltered in the bosom of a deeply indented bay, alone tell you of the presence of man. The evergreen oaks hang in such masses over the waves that the boatmen glide | under their branches, and often sleep cradled in their arms. Such is the character of the "Il faut du tems," says Voltaire, "pourque coast on the Asiatic side as far as the castle | les grandes reputations murissent." As a deof Mahomet II., which seems to shut it in as scriber of nature, we place Lamartine at the closely as any Swiss lake. Beyond that, the head of all writers, ancient or modern-above character changes; the hills are less rugged, Scott or Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël or and descend in gentler slopes to the water's Humboldt. He aims at a different object from edge; charming little plains, checkered with any of these great writers. He does not, like. fruit-trees. and shaded by planes, frequently them, describe the emotion produced on the open; and the delicious Sweet Waters of Asia mind by the contemplation of nature; he exhibit a scene of enchantment equal to any paints the objects in the scene itself, their described in the Arabian Nights. Women, colours and traits, their forms and substance, children, and black slaves in every variety of their lights and shadows. A painter following costume and colour; veiled ladies from Con- exactly what he portrays, would make a glostantinople; cattle and buffaloes ruminating in rious gallery of landscapes. He is, moreover, the pastures; Arab horses clothed in the most a charming poet, an eloquent debater, and has sumptuous trappings of velvet and gold; written many able and important works on caïques filled with Armenian and Circassian politics, yet we never recollect, during the last young women, seated under the shade or play-twenty years, to have heard his name mening with their children, some of the most ravishing beauty, form a scene of variety and interest probably unique in the world."-(III. 331, 332.)

These are the details of the piece: here is the general impression:

"One evening, by the light of a splendid moon, which was reflected from the sea of Marmora, and the violet summits of Mount Olympus, I sat alone under the cypresses of the 'Ladders of the Dead; those cypresses which overshadow innumerable tombs of

tioned in English society except once, when an old and caustic, but most able judge, now no more, said, "I have been reading Lamartine's Travels in the East-it seems a perfect rhapsody."

We must not suppose, however, from this, that the English nation is incapable cf appreciating the highest degree of eminence in the fine arts, or that we are never destined to rise to excellence in any but the mechanical. It is the multitude of subordinate writers of mode rate merit who obstruct all the avenues to