“I hope the hereafter will not lack something to remind us of the beautiful earth-life—beautiful in spite of its sin and sorrow.”—Whittier’s Letters.
WHEN my friend George Jolliffe had passed his diplomatic examination, I promised him that I would go out and pay him a month’s visit wherever he was sent to. Thus I came to set out for Constantinople on April 10, 1890. The faithful Hugh Bryans went with me. At Vienna I spent several days with the Lützows, who showed me the sights in the most agreeable way. The town was full of grand-dukes or exiled princes—Cumberland, Parma, Tuscany, &c., all very rich and adding to its prosperity.
To Miss Leycester.
“British Embassy, Constantinople, April 22, 1890.—We came straight through from Vienna, through the strange unknown country. There were vast plains of corn till Belgrade, a poor town hanging shaggy on the hillside: then we entered low wooded hills like the Sabina. In the Servian villages of rude huts and ruder fences we could see the swarming people, men and women in loose folds of white linen, the former with the air of princes. All seemed remote and unreal, and the shadows, as in Syrian clearness, fell pure blue upon the dusty hills. By the second morning we were passing through Roumelia. All had become poorer. The villages, of wretched huts, stood in wattled enclosures of thorns, inside which all the domestic animals are driven. Now, the men were seen in crimson and green, with magnificent mahogany-coloured faces beneath their turbans, and the women, all closely veiled, moved like masses of dark drapery; a little mosque appeared, with a delicate and refined minaret; a little fountain-cistern with a gothic arch in a grove of thorns; marshes with storks; plains with buffaloes.
“About 3 P.M. the lovely Sea of Marmora gleamed upon the right, with a variety of inlet bays of solitary beauty, and, in the distance, the aërial mountains of Asia. Then a succession of battlemented towers rose on the left from the untrodden plain—the walls of Stamboul! Through these the train passes. We were far from the station still, but what a change from our two days’ desolation! We rushed across many shabby courts, paved either with mud or rough stones. The old houses, with their projecting lattices, were veiled in a web of flowering wistaria, and shaded by pink Judas-trees in fullest bloom. Then above us rose the mosques with their slender minarets and huge storm-blasted cypresses. St. Sophia itself, Achmet, Suleiman, Mahmoud were passed, with many a strange gothic fountain or decorated cistern, before we reached the shed-like station, where George was a most welcome sight, armed with an Embassy cavass to extricate us from the mass of yelping, screaming natives.
“Off we went across the creaking, rocking, timber bridge over the Golden Horn, thronged by the strangest of multitudes. Then up the steep street of Galata, where the lattices project till they almost obliterate the sky, and the pavement is made of rough stones set edgeways, up which the horses scrambled like cats. A road succeeded, a dusty deep-rutted track, overlooking an old burial-ground without barriers, where, amid the immemorial cypresses, thousands of battered tombstones remain, neglected, ruined, but never wilfully destroyed; and so we reached the handsome palace of the Embassy, with its delightful garden, overlooking the valley of the Golden Horn.
“I have been here two days now, and cannot say how delightful I find it to be with George, with whom every thought may be exchanged. I live in the room of an absent attaché, and the life is like that of a college. Unfortunately, on the first afternoon I caught a dreadful chill in the boat, and have been very ill ever since, though I dragged myself out yesterday to take advantage of a rarely procured permit to see the famous church of St. Irene, where the Council of Constantinople was held, and where the Christian emperors, Constantine, Arcadius, &c., repose, some of them in grand porphyry sarcophagi. I went with two clergymen, friends of Arthur Stanley, Canon Farrar of Durham, and Dr. Livingstone, who had been to every other scene of a General Council: this was the last!”