Chapter X: Part 10

Humboldt is, in many respects, and perhaps upon the whole, at the head of the list; and to his profound and varied works we hope to be able to devote a future paper. He unites, in a degree that perhaps has never before been witnessed, the most various qualities, and which, from the opposite characters of mind which they require, are rarely found in unison. A profound philosopher, an accurate observer of nature, an unwearied statist, he is at the same time an eloquent writer, an incomparable describer, and an ardent friend of social improvement. Science owes to his indefatigable industry many of her most valuable acquisitions; geography, to his intrepid perseverance, many of its most important discoveries; the arts, to his poetic eye and fervid eloquence, many of their brightest pictures. He unites the austere grandeur of the exact sciences to the bewitching charm of the fine arts. It is this very combination which prevents his works from being generally popular. The riches of his knowledge, the magnitude of his contributions to scientific discovery, the fervour of his descriptions of nature, alternately awaken our admiration and excite our surprise; but they oppress the mind. To be rightly apprehended, they require a reader in some degree familiar with all these subjects; and how many of these are to be met with? The man who takes an interest in his scientific observations will seldom be transported by his pictures of scenery; the social observer, who extracts the rich collection of facts which he has accumulated regarding the people whom he visited, will be indifferent to his geographical discoveries. There are few Humboldts either in the reading or thinking world.

Chateaubriand is a traveller of a wholly different character--he lived entirely in antiquity. But it is not the antiquity of Greece and Rome which has alone fixed his regards, as it has done those of Clarke and Eustace--it is the recollections of chivalry, the devout spirit of the pilgrim, which chiefly warmed his ardent imagination. He is universally allowed by Frenchmen of all parties to be their first writer; and it may be conceived what brilliant works an author of such powers, and eminently gifted both with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter, must have produced in describing the historic scenes to which his pilgrimages extended. He went to Greece and the Holy Land with a mind devout rather than enlightened, credulous rather than inquisitive. Thirsting for strong emotions, he would be satisfied; teeming with the recollections and visions of the past, he traversed the places hallowed by his early affections with the fondness of a lover who returns to the home of his bliss, of a mature man who revisits the scenes of his infancy. He cared not to enquire what was true or what was legendary in these time-hallowed traditions; he gladly accepted them as they stood, and studiously averted all enquiry into the foundation on which they rested. He wandered over the Peloponnesus or Judea with the fond ardour of an English scholar who seeks in the Palatine Mount the traces of Virgil's enchanting description of the hut of Evander, and rejects as sacrilege every attempt to shake his faith.

"When Science from Creation's face
Enchantment's visions draws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws!"

Even in the woods of America, the same ruling passion was evinced. In those pathless solitudes, where no human foot had ever trod but that of the wandering savage, and the majesty of nature appeared in undisturbed repose, his thoughts were still of the Old World. It was on the historic lands that his heart was set. A man himself, he dwelt on the scenes which had been signalized by the deeds, the sufferings, the glories of man.

Michaud's mind is akin to that of Chateaubriand, and yet different in many important particulars. The learned and indefatigable historian of the Crusades, he has traversed the shores of the Mediterranean--the scene, as Dr Johnson observed, of all that can ever interest man--his religion, his knowledge, his arts--with the ardent desire to imprint on his mind the scenes and images which met the eyes of the holy warriors. He seeks to transport us to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse; he thirsts with the Christian host at Dorislaus, he shares in its anxieties at the siege of Antioch, he participates in its exultation at the storming of Jerusalem. The scenes visited by the vast multitude of warriors who, during two hundred years, were precipitated from Europe on Asia, have almost all been visited by him, and described with the accuracy of an antiquary and the enthusiasm of a poet. With the old chronicles in his hand, he treads with veneration the scenes of former generous sacrifice and heroic achievements, and the vast and massy structures erected on either side during those terrible wars--when, for centuries, Europe strove hand to hand with Asia--most of which have undergone very little alteration, enable him to describe them almost exactly as they appeared to the holy warriors. The interest of his pilgrimage in the East, accordingly, is peculiar, but very great; it is not so much a book of travels as a moving chronicle; but, like Sir W. Scott's _Minstrelsy of the Borders_, it is a chronicle clothed in a very different garb from the homely dress of the olden time. It transports us back, not only in time but in idea, six hundred years; but it does so with the grace of modern times--it clothes the profound feelings, the generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness of self of the twelfth century, with the poetic mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery of the nineteenth.

Lamartine has traversed the same scenes with Chateaubriand and Michaud, and yet he has done so in a different spirit; and the character of his work is essentially different from either. He has not the devout credulity of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and knowledge of the last; but he is superior to either in the description of nature, and the painting vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of the reader. His work is a moving panorama, in which the historic scenes and azure skies, and placid seas and glowing sunsets, of the East, are portrayed in all their native brilliancy, and in richer even than their native colours. His mind is stored with the associations and the ideas of antiquity, and he has thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of Greece or Holy Writ, all the charms of such recollections; but he has done so in a more general and catholic spirit than either of his predecessors. He embarked for the Holy Land shortly before the Revolution of 1830; and his thoughts, amidst all the associations of antiquity, constantly reverted to the land of his fathers--its distractions, its woes, its ceaseless turmoil, its gloomy social prospects. Thus, with all his vivid imagination and unrivaled powers of description, the turn of his mind is essentially contemplative. He looks on the past as an emblem of the present; he sees, in the fall of Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem, the fate which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and foreboding disposition was much increased by the death of his daughter--a charming child of fourteen, the companion of his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, the darling of his affections--who was snatched away in the spring of life, when in health and joy, by one of the malignant fevers incident to the pestilential plains of the East.

Though Lamartine's travels are continuous, he does not, like most other wanderers, furnish us with a journal of every day's proceedings. He was too well aware that many, perhaps most, days on a journey are monotonous or uninteresting; and that many of the details of a traveller's progress are wholly unworthy of being recorded, because they are neither amusing, elevating, nor instructive. He paints, now and then, with all the force of his magical pencil, the more brilliant or characteristic scenes which he visited, and intersperses them with reflections, moral and social; such as would naturally be aroused in a sensitive mind by the sight of the rains of ancient, and the contemplation of the decay of modern times.

He embarked at Marseilles, with Madame Lamartine and his little daughter Julia, on the 10th July 1830. The following is the picture of the yearnings of his mind on leaving his native land; and they convey a faithful image of his intellectual temperament:--

"I feel it deeply: I am one only of those men, without a
distinctive character, of a transitory and fading epoch, whose
sighs have found an echo--only because the echo was more
poetical than the poet. I belong to another age by my desires:
I feel in myself another man: the immense and boundless horizon
of philosophy, at once profound, religious, and poetical, has
opened to my view, but the punishment of a wasted youth
overtook me; it soon faded from my sight. Adieu, then, to the
dreams of genius, to the aspirations of intellectual enjoyment!
It is too late: I have not physical strength to accomplish any
thing great. I will sketch some scenes--I will murmur some
strains, and that is all. Yet if God would grant my prayers,
here is the object for which I would petition--a poem, such as
my heart desires, and his greatness deserves!--a faithful,
breathing image of his creation: of the boundless world,
visible and invisible! That would indeed be a worthy
inheritance to leave to an era of darkness, of doubt, and of
sadness!--an inheritance which would nourish the present age,
and cause the next to spring with renovated youth."--(_Voyages
en Orient_, I. 49-60.[46])

One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea, portrays the tender and profoundly religious impressions of his mind:--

"I walked for an hour on the deck of the vessel alone, and
immersed alternately in sad or consoling reflections. I
repeated in my heart all the prayers which I learned in infancy
from my mother: the verses, the fragments of the Psalms, which
I had so often heard her repeat to herself, when walking in the
evening in the garden of Melly. I experienced a melancholy
pleasure in thus scattering them, in my turn, to the waves, to
the winds, to that Ear which is ever open to every real
movement of the heart, though not yet uttered by the lips. The
prayer which we have heard repeated by one we have loved, and
who is no more, is doubly sacred. Who among us would not prefer
a few words of prayer taught us by our mother, to the most
eloquent supplication composed by ourselves? Thence it is that
whatever religious creed we may adopt at the age of reason, the
Christian prayer will be ever the prayer of the human race. I
prayed, in the prayer of the church for the evening at sea;
also for that dear being, who never thought of danger to
accompany her husband, and that lovely child, who played at the
moment on the poop with the goat which was to give it milk on
board, and with the little kids which licked her snow-white
hands, and sported with her long and fair ringlets."--(I. 57.)

A night-scene on the coast of Provence gives a specimen of his descriptive powers.

"It was night--that is, what they call night in those climates;
but how many days have I seen less brilliant on the banks of
the Thames, the Seine, the Saone, or the Lake of Geneva! A full
noon shone in the firmament, and cast into the shade our
vessel, which lay motionless on the water at a little distance
from the quay. The moon, in her progress through the heavens,
had left a path marked as if with red sand, with which she had
besprinkled the half of the sky: the remainder was clear deep
blue, which melted into white as she advanced. On the horizon,
at the distance of two miles, between two little isles, of
which the one had headlands pointed and coloured like the
Coliseum at Rome, while the other was violet like the flower of
the lilac, the image of a vast city appeared on the sea. It was
an illusion, doubtless; but it had all the appearance of
reality. You saw clearly the domes glancing--dazzling lines of
palaces--quays flooded by a soft and serene light; on the right
and the left the waves were seen to sparkle and enclose it on
either side: it was Venice or Malta reposing in the midst of
the waters. The illusion was produced by the reflection of the
moon, when her rays fell perpendicularly on the waters; nearer
the eye, the radiance spread and expanded in a stream of gold
and silver between two shores of azure. On the left, the gulf
extended to the summit of a long and obscure range of serrated
mountains; on the right opened a narrow and deep valley, where
a fountain gushed forth beneath the shade of aged trees;
behind, rose a hill, clothed to the top with olives, which in
the night appeared dark, from its summit to its base--a line of
Gothic towers and white houses broke the obscurity of the wood,
and drew the thoughts to the abodes, the joys, and the
sufferings of man. Further off, in the extremity of the gulf,
three enormous rocks rose, like pillars without base, from the
surface of the waters--their forms were fantastic, their
surface polished like flints by the action of the waves; but
those flints were mountains--the remains, doubtless, of that
primeval ocean which once overspread the earth, and of which
our seas are but a feeble image."--(II. 66.)

A rocky bay on the same romantic coast, now rendered accessible to travellers by the magnificent road of the Corniché, projected, and in part executed by Napoleon, furnishes another subject for this exquisite pencil:--

"A mile to the eastward on the coast, the mountains, which
there dip into the sea, are broken as if by the strokes of
enormous clubs--huge fragments have fallen, and are strewed in
wild confusion at the foot of the cliffs, or amidst the blue
and green waves of the sea, which incessantly laves them. The
waves break on these huge masses without intermission, with a
hollow and alternating roar, or rise up in sheets of foam,
which besprinkle their hoary fronts. These masses of
mountains--for they are too large to be called rocks--are piled
and heaped together in such numbers, that they form an
innumerable number of narrow havens, of profound caverns, of
sounding grottoes, of gloomy fissures--of which the children of
some of the neighbouring fishermen alone know the windings and
the issues. One of these caverns, into which you enter by a
natural arch, the summit of which is formed by an enormous
block of granite, lets in the sea, through which it flows into
a dark and narrow valley, which the waters fill entirely, with
a surface as limpid and smooth as the firmament which they
reflect. The sea preserves in this sequestered nook that
beautiful tint of bright green, of which marine painters so
strongly feel the value, but which they can never transfer
exactly to their canvass; for the eye sees much which the hand
strives in vain to imitate.

"On the two sides of that marine valley rise two prodigious
walls of perpendicular rock, of an uniform and sombre hue,
similar to that of iron ore, after it has issued and cooled
from the furnace. Not a plant, not a moss can find a slope or a
crevice wherein to insert its roots, or cover the rocks with
those waving garlands which so often in Savoy clothe the
cliffs, where they flower to God alone. Black, naked,
perpendicular, repelling the eye by their awful aspect--they
seem to have been placed there for no other purpose but to
protect from the sea-breezes the hills of olives and vines,
which bloom under their shelter; an image of those ruling men
in a stormy epoch, who seem placed by Providence to bear the
fury of all the tempests of passion and of time, to screen the
weaker but happier race of mortals. At the bottom of the bay
the sea expands a little, assumes a bluer tint as it comes to
reflect more of the cloudless heavens, and at length its tiny
waves die away on a bed of violets, as closely netted together
as the sand upon the shore. If you disembark from the boat, you
find in the cleft of a neighbouring ravine a fountain of living
water, which gushes beneath a narrow path formed by the goats,
which leads up from this sequestered solitude, amidst
overshadowing fig-trees and oleanders, to the cultivated abodes
of man. Few scenes struck me so much in my long wanderings. Its
charm consists in that exquisite union of force and grace,
which forms the perfection of natural beauty as of the highest
class of intellectual beings; it is that mysterious hymen of
the land and the sea, surprised, as it were, in their most
secret and hidden union. It is the image of perfect calm and
inaccessible solitude, close to the theatre of tumultuous
tempests, where their near roar is heard with such terror,
where their foaming but lessened waves yet break upon the
shore. It is one of those numerous _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of
creation which God has scattered over the earth, as if to sport
with contrasts, but which he conceals so frequently on the
summit of naked rocks, in the depth of inaccessible ravines, on
the unapproachable shores of the ocean, like jewels which he
unveils rarely, and that only to simple beings, to children, to
shepherds or fishermen, or the devout worshippers of
nature."--(I. 73--74.)

This style of description of scenery is peculiar to this age, and in it Lamartine may safely be pronounced without a rival in the whole range of literature. It was with Scott and Chateaubriand that the _graphic_ style of description arose in England and France; but he has pushed the art further than either of his great predecessors. Milton and Thompson had long ago indeed, in poetry, painted nature in the most enchanting, as well as the truest colours; but in prose little was to be found except a general and vague description of a class of objects, as lakes, mountains, and rivers, without any specification of features and details, so as to convey a definite and distinct impression to the mind of the reader. Even the classical mind and refined taste of Addison could not attain this graphic style; his descriptions of scenery, like that of all prose writers down to the close of the eighteenth century, are lost in vague generalities. Like almost all descriptions of battles in modern times, they are so like each other that you cannot distinguish one from the other. Scott and Chateaubriand, when they did apply their great powers to the delineation of nature, were incomparably faithful, as well as powerfully imaginative; but such descriptions were, for the most part, but a secondary object with them. The human heart was their great study; the vicissitudes of life the inexhaustible theme of their genius. With Lamartine, again, the description of nature is the primary object. It is to convey a vivid impression of the scenes he has visited that he has written; to kindle in his reader's mind the train of emotion and association which their contemplation awakened in his own, that he has exerted all his powers. He is much more laboured and minute, in consequence, than either of his predecessors; he records the tints, the forms, the lights, the transient effects, with all a painter's enthusiasm and all a poet's power; and succeeds, in any mind at all familiar with the objects of nature, in conjuring up images as vivid, sometimes perhaps more beautiful, than the originals which he portrayed.

From the greatness of his powers, however, in this respect, and the facility with which he commits to paper the whole features of the splendid phantasmagoria with which his memory is stored, arises the principal defect of his work; and the circumstance which has hitherto prevented it, in this country at least, from acquiring general popularity commensurate to its transcendent merits. He is too rich in glowing images; his descriptions are redundant in number and beauty. The mind even of the most imaginative reader is fatigued by the constant drain upon its admiration--the fancy is exhausted in the perpetual effort to conceive the scenes which he portrays to the eye. Images of beauty enough are to be found in his four volumes of _Travels in the East_, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, insipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels--"Be assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an object;" and Lamartine would sometimes be the better of following the advice. We generally close one of his volumes with the feeling so well known to travellers in the Italian cities, "I hope to God there is nothing more to be seen here." And having given the necessary respite of unexciting disquisition to rest our readers' minds, we shall again bring forward one of his glowing pictures:--

"Between the sea and the last heights of Lebanon, which sink
rapidly almost to the water's edge, extends a plain eight
leagues in length by one or two broad; sandy, bare, covered
only with thorny arbutus, browsed by the camels of caravans.
From it darts out into the sea an advanced peninsula, linked to
the continent only by a narrow _chaussée_ of shining sand,
borne hither by the winds of Egypt. Tyre, now called Sour by
the Arabs, is situated 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
grey 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 grey
rocks, piled one on another as if by human hands. Here and
there a few stunted vines, yellow with the colour of autumn,
crept along the soil in a few places cleared out in the
wilderness. Fig-trees, with their tops withered or shivered by
the blasts, often edged the vines, and cast their black fruit
on the grey 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 sear 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 grey; 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.

"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 grey 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.)

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 grey 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 grey 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 mourning,
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 other travellers:--

"We rose with the sun, the first rays of which struck on the
temples of Balbec, and gave to those mysterious ruins that
_eclât_ which his brilliant light throws ever over ruins which
it illuminates. Soon we arrived, on the northern side, at the
foot of the gigantic walls which surround those beautiful
remains. A clear stream, flowing over a bed of granite,
murmured around the enormous blocks of 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
site--that 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.

"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; every where 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
attempt 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 around
that platform were a series of lesser 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 we were surrounded. One by one
they enveloped 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 to us 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
advancing, 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.)

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 attraction. Considering in what spirit the French Revolution was cradled, and from what infidelity it arose, it is consoling to see such sentiments conceived and published among them. True they are not the sentiments of the majority, at least in towns; but what then? The majority is ever guided by the thoughts of the great, not in its own but a preceding age. It is the opinions of the great among our grandfathers that govern the majority at this time; our great men will guide our grandsons. If we would foresee what a future age is to think, we must observe what a few great men are now thinking. Voltaire and Rousseau have ruled France for two generations; the day of Chateaubriand and Guizot and Lamartine will come in due time.

But the extraordinary magnitude of these ruins in the middle of an Asiatic wilderness, suggests another consideration. We are perpetually speaking of the march of intellect, the vast spread of intelligence, the advancing civilization of the world; and in some respects 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 hundredfold the reading and thinking 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 increased direction of the popular mind to lofty 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 Buckingham tells us in his _Travels beyond the Jordan_, 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 general refinement and the spread of intellectual intelligence. The domestic duties are better nourished in the temple than in the gin-shop; the admirers of sculpture will make better fathers and husbands than the lovers of whisky. Is it that we want funds for such undertakings? Why, London is richer than ever Rome was; the commerce of the world, not of the eastern caravans, flows through its bosom. The sums annually squandered in Manchester and Glasgow on intoxicating liquors, would soon make them rival the eternal structures of Tadmor and Palmyra. Is it that the great bulk of our people are unavoidably chained by their character and climate to gross and degrading enjoyments? Is it that the spreading of knowledge, intelligence, and free institutions, only confirms the sway of sensual gratification, and that a pure and spiritual religion tends only to strengthen the fetters of passion and selfishness? Is it that the inherent depravity of 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:--

"It is midnight; the sea is calm as a mirror; the 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 Troy. 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 re-people 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:--

"It was five in the morning, I was standing on deck; we made
sail towards the mouth of the Bosphorus, skirting the walls of
Constantinople. After half an hour's navigation through ships
at anchor, we touched the walls of the seraglio, which prolongs
those of the city, and form, at the extremity of the hill which
supports 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 plane-tree 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.

"The harbour of Constantinople is not, properly speaking, a
port. It is rather a great river like the Thames, shut in on
either side by hills covered with houses, and covered by
innumerable lines of ships lying at anchor 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 alabastros,
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.)

"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 enameled with green, which lie at the foot
of 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 coast on
the Asiatic side as far as the castle of Mahomet II., which
seems to shut it in as closely as any Swiss lake. Beyond that,
the character changes; the hills are less rugged, and descend
in gentler slopes to the water's edge; charming little plains,
checkered with fruit-trees and shaded by planes, frequently
open; and the delicious Sweet Waters of Asia exhibit a scene of
enchantment equal to any described in the Arabian Nights.
Women, children, and black slaves in every variety of costume
and colour; veiled ladies from Constantinople; cattle and
buffaloes ruminating in the pastures; Arab horses clothed in
the most sumptuous trappings of velvet and gold; caïques filled
with Armenian and Circassian young women, seated under the
shade or playing 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 Mussulmans, and descend from the heights of Pera to
the shores of the sea. No one ever passes at that hour: you
would suppose yourself 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 fleet--all 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.)