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:—