Nathaniel Parker Willis

“ Farther on, toward the northern horn of the bay, lies the mount of Posilipo, the ancient coast of Baiæ, Cape Mysene, and the mountain isles of Procida and Ischia, the last of which still preserves the costumes of Greece, from which it was colonised centuries ago. The bay itself is as blue as the sky, scarcely ruffled all day with the wind, and covered by countless boats fishing or creeping on with their picturesque lateen sails just filled: while the atmosphere over sea, city, and mountain, is of a clearness and brilliancy which is inconceivable in other countries. ”

“ Yet the world contains nothing like Constantinople! If we could compel all our senses into one, and live by the pleasures of the eye, it were a paradise untranscended. The Bosphorus—the superb, peculiar, incomparable Bosphorus! the dream-like, fairy-built seraglio! the sights within the city so richly strange, and the valleys and streams around it so exquisitely fair! the voluptuous softness of the dark eyes haunting your every step on shore, and the spirit-like swiftness and elegance of your darting caique upon the waters! In what land is the priceless sight such a treasure? ”

“ The Bosphorus is quite—there can be no manner of doubt of it—the most singularly beautiful scenery in the world. From Constantinople to the Black Sea, a distance of twenty miles, the two shores of Asia and Europe, separated by but half a mile of bright blue water, are lined by lovely villages, each with its splendid palace or two, its mosque and minarets, and its hundred small houses buried in trees, each with its small dark cemetery of cypresses and turbaned head-stones, and each with its valley stretching back into the hills, of which every summit and swell is crowned with a fairy kiosk. ”

“ Ægæan Sea.—We got under way this morning, and stood towards Athens, followed by the sloop-of-war, “John Adams,” which had come to anchor under our stern the evening of our arrival at Ægina. The day is like every day of the Grecian summer, heavenly. The stillness and beauty of a new world lie about us. The ships steal on with their clouds of canvass just filling in the light breeze of the Ægæan, and withdrawing the eye from the lofty temple crowning the mountain on our lee, whose shining columns shift slowly as we pass; we could believe ourselves asleep on the sea. ”

“ No palace window looks on a fairer scene. The broad Strait was as smooth as the amber of the old Hebrew’s pipe, and the vines that furnished Themistocles with wine during his exile in Persia, looked of as golden a green in the light of the sunset, as if the honour of the tribute still warmed their classic juices.
The rich Turkish coffee was brought in by an old woman, who left her slippers below as she stepped upon the mat, and our host followed with chibouques and a renewed welcome. ”

“ A little lap of a valley opens right away from the door to the bosom of the bay, and in the midst of the glassy basin lies the bold peninsular promontory and fortification of Porto Ferrajo, like a castle in a loch, connected with the body of the island by a mere rib of sand. Off beyond sleeps the main-land of Italy, mountain and vale, like a smoothly-shaped bed of clouds; and for the foreground of the landscape, the valleys of Elba are just now green with fig-trees and vines, speckled here and there with fields of golden grain, and farm-houses shaded with all the trees of this genial climate. ”

“ It was so like the scenery in a play, that I looked at my companion with half a doubt that it was some optical delusion. It reminded me of some of Martin’s engravings. The sublime is so well imitated in our day that one is less surprised than he would suppose when nature produces the reality.
The night was very beautiful when we reached the summit of the mountain above Trieste. The new moon silvered the little curved bay below like a polished shield, and right in the path of its beams lay the two frigates like a painting. ”

“ The last is a circumstance the traveller does well not to miss. A long street extends along the bay, lined with the houses of the rich merchants of the town, and for the two hours before sunset every family is to be seen sitting outside its door upon the public pavement, while beaux and belles stroll up and down in all the gaiety of perpetual holiday. They are the most out-of-doors people, the Smyrniotes, that I have ever seen. And one reason perhaps is, that they have a beauty which has nothing to fear from the daylight. ”

“ I can compare standing on the top of Vesuvius and looking down upon the bay and city of Naples, to nothing but mounting a peak in the infernal regions overlooking paradise. The larger crater encircles you entirely for a mile, cutting off the view of the sides of the mountain, and from the elevation of the new cone, you look over the rising edge of this black field of smoke and cinders, and drop the eye at once upon Naples, lying asleep in the sun, with its lazy sails upon the water, and the green hills enclosing it clad in the indescribable beauty of an Italian atmosphere. ”

“ Six or seven miles from Constantinople, on the European shore, stands the serai of the sultan’s eldest sister. It is a Chinese-looking structure, but exceedingly picturesque, and like everything else on the Bosphorus, quite in keeping with the scene. There is not a building on either side, from the Black Sea to Marmora, that would not be ridiculous in other countries; and yet, here, their gingerbread balconies, imitation perspectives, lattices, bird-cages, and kiosks, seem as naturally the growth of the climate as the pomegranate and the cypress. ”

“ On every sloping hill-side, in every rural nook, in the court of the splendid mosque, stands a dark necropolis, a small city of the dead, shadowed so thickly by the close growing cypresses, that the light of heaven penetrates but dimly. You can have no conception of the beauty it adds to the landscape. And then from the bosom of each, a slender minaret shoots into the sky as if pointing out the flight of the departed spirit, and if you enter within its religious darkness, you find a taste and elegance unknown in more civilised countries ”

“ It is difficult to conceive the gay costumes and handsome features of the Albanese existing in these barren mountains that bind the Adriatic. It has been but a continued undulation of rock and sand, for three days past; and the closer we hug to the shore, the more we look at the broad canvass above us, and pray for wind. We make Capo d’Istria now, a small town nestled in a curve of the sea, and an hour or two more will bring us to Trieste, where we drop anchor, we hope for many an hour of novelty and pleasure. ”

“ There is no traveller to the East, of any nation, who does not carry away with him from Smyrna, grateful recollections of one at least whose hospitality is as open as his gate. This living over warehouses of opium, I am inclined to think, is healthy for the heart.
After having seen the packing of figs, wondered at the enormous burdens carried by the porters, ridden to Bougiar and the castle on the hill, and admired the caravan of the Bey-Oglou, whose camels are the handsomest that come into Smyrna, one has nothing to do but dine, dance, and walk on the Marina. ”

“ The twilight air was laden with the fragrant thyme, and the songs of the Greek labourers returning from the fields came faintly over the plains. Life seems too short, when every breath is a pleasure. I loitered about the clear and rocky lip of the fountain, till the pool below reflected the stars in its trembling bosom. The lamps began to twinkle in Athens, Hesperus rose over Mount Pentilicus like a blazing lamp, the sky over Salamis faded down to the sober tint of night, and the columns of the Parthenon mingled into a single mass of shade. ”

“ Strolling through the bazaar is an endless amusement. It is slow work, for the streets are as crowded as a church-aisle after service; and, pushed aside one moment by a bevy of Turkish ladies, shuffling along in their yellow slippers, muffled to the eyes, the next by a fat slave carrying a child, again by a kervas armed to the teeth, and clearing the way for some coming dignitary, you find your only policy is to draw in your elbows, and suffer the motley crowd to shove you about at their pleasure. ”

“ In the most lonely parts of the Ægæan, where you can see no trace of a human foot, it strikes you like a foreign land. Then the atmosphere is its own, and it exceeds that of Italy, far. It gives it the look of a landscape seen through a faintly-teinted glass. Soft blue mists of the most rarefied and changing shapes envelop the mountains on the clearest day, and without obscuring the most distant points perceptibly, give hill and vale a beauty that surpasses that of verdure. I never saw such air as I see in Greece. ”

“ Through the plain beneath ran the classic Ilissus, and on its banks stood the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Olympus, which I had distinguished with the glass in coming up the Ægæan. The Ilissus was nearly dry, but a small island covered with verdure divided its waters a short distance above the temple, and near it were distinguishable the foundations of the Lyceum. Aristotle and his Peripatetics ramble there no more. A herd of small Turkish horses were feeding up toward Hymettus, the only trace of life in a valley that was once alive with the brightest of the tides of human existence. ”

“ A row of low-built cafés, with a latticed enclosure and a plentiful shade of plane-trees on the right; a large square, in the centre of which stood a magnificent Persian fountain, as large as a church, covered with lapis-lazuli and gold, and endless inscriptions in Turkish; a mosque buried in cypresses on the left; a hundred indolent-looking, large-trousered, moustached, and withal very handsome men, and twice the number of snarling, wolfish, and half-starved dogs, are some of the objects which the first glance, as I stepped on shore, left on my memory. ”

“ They were lined with marble, as the whole amphitheatre appears to have been. To realise the effect of these ruins, it is to be remembered that they are imbedded in solid lava, like rock, near a hundred feet deep, and that the city, which is itself ancient, is built above them. The carriage in which we came, stood high over our heads, in a time-worn street, and ages had passed and many generations of men had lived and died over a splendid city, whose very name had been forgotten! It was discovered in sinking a well, which struck the door of the amphitheatre. ”

“ Rome, Florence, Athens, were delightful from the store of history and poetry I brought with me and had accumulated in my youth—from what they once were, and for that of which they preserved the ruins. Constantinople, on the contrary, is still the gem of the Orient—still the home of the superb Turk, and the resort of many nations of the East—still all that fires curiosity and excites the imagination in the descriptions of the traveller. ”

“ Can this be Athens? Are these the same isles and mountains Alcibiades saw, returning with his victorious galleys from the Hellespont; the same that faded on the long gaze of the conqueror of Salamis, leaving his ungrateful country for exile; the same that to have seen, for a Roman, was to be complete as a man; the same whose proud dames wore the golden grasshopper in their hair, as a boasting token that they had sprung from the soil; the same where Pericles nursed the arts, and Socrates and Plato taught “humanity,” and Epicurus walked with his disciples, looking for truth? ”

“ Thickets of brush and willows enclosed a fountain, whose clear waters were confined in a tank, formed of marble slabs, from the neighbouring ruins. A spreading tree above, and soft meadow-grass to its very tip, left nothing to wish but friends and a quiet mind to perfect its beauty. The cook’s fires were smoking in the thicket, the horses were grazing without saddle or bridle in the pasture below, and we laid down upon the soft Turkish carpets, spread beneath the trees, and reposed from our fatigues for an hour. ”

“ It is called in Turkish khyat-khana. Opening with a gentle curve from the Golden Horn, it winds away into the hills toward Belgrade, its long and even hollow thridded by a lively stream, and carpeted by a broad belt of unbroken green sward swelling up to the enclosing hills, with a grass so verdant and silken that it seems the very floor of faëry. In the midst of its longest stretch to the eye (perhaps two miles of level meadow) stands a beautiful serai of the sultan’s, unfenced and open, as if it had sprung from the lap of the green meadow like a lily. ”

“ We parted unwillingly, and reaching Palermo about midnight, pulled off to the frigates, and were under-weigh at daylight for Messina.
This is the poetry of sailing. The long, low frigate glides on through the water with no more motion than is felt in a dining-room on shore. The sea changes only from a glossy calm to a feathery ripple, the sky is always serene, the merchant sail appears and disappears on the horizon edge, the island rises on the bow, creeps along the quarter, is examined by the glasses of the idlers on deck and sinks gradually astern ”