LAMARTINE.

It is remarkable, that although England is the country in the world

which has sent forth the greatest number of ardent and intrepid

travellers to explore the distant parts of the earth, yet it can by no

means furnish an array of writers of travels which will bear a

comparison with those whom France can boast. In skilful navigation,

daring adventure, and heroic perseverance, indeed, the country of Cook

and Davis, of Bruce and Park, of Mackenzie and Buckingham, of Burckhardt

and Byron, of Parry and Franklin, may well claim the pre-eminence of all

others in the world. An Englishman first circumnavigated the globe; an

Englishman alone has seen the fountains of the Nile; and, five years

after the ardent spirit of Columbus had led his fearful crews across the

Atlantic, Sebastian Cabot discovered the shores of Newfoundland, and

planted the British standard in the regions destined to be peopled with

the overflowing multitudes of the Anglo-Saxon race.

But if we come to the literary works which have followed these ardent

and energetic efforts, and which are destined to perpetuate their memory

to future times--the interesting discoveries which have so much extended

our knowledge and enlarged our resources--the contemplation is by no

means to an inhabitant of these islands equally satisfactory. The

British traveller is essentially a man of energy and action, but rarely

of contemplation or eloquence. He is seldom possessed of the scientific

acquirements requisite to turn to the best account the vast stores of

new and original information which are placed within his reach. He often

observes and collects facts; but it is as a practical man, or for

professional purposes, rather than as a philosopher. The genius of the

Anglo-Saxon race--bold, sagacious, and enterprising, rather than

contemplative and scientific--nowhere appears more strongly than in the

accounts of the numerous and intrepid travellers whom they are

continually sending forth into every part of the earth. We admire their

vigour, we are moved by their hardships, we are enriched by their

discoveries; but if we turn to our libraries for works to convey to

future ages an adequate and interesting account of these fascinating

adventures, we shall, in general, experience nothing but disappointment.

Few of them are written with the practised hand, the graphic eye,

necessary to convey vivid pictures to future times; and though numerous

and valuable books of travels, as works of reference, load the shelves

of our libraries, there are surprisingly few which are fitted, from the

interest and vivacity of the style in which they are written, to possess

permanent attractions for mankind.

One great cause of this remarkable peculiarity is without doubt to be

found in the widely different education of the students in our

universities, and our practical men. In the former, classical

attainments are in literature the chief, if not exclusive, objects of

ambition; and in consequence, the young aspirants for fame who issue

from these learned retreats, have their minds filled with the charms and

associations of antiquity, to the almost entire exclusion of objects of

present interest and importance. The vigorous practical men, again, who

are propelled by the enterprise and exertions of our commercial towns,

are sagacious and valuable observers; but they have seldom the

cultivated minds, pictorial eye, or powers of description, requisite to

convey vivid or interesting impressions to others. Thus our scholars

give us little more than treatises on inscriptions, and disquisitions on

the sites of ancient towns; while the accounts of our practical men are

chiefly occupied with commercial enquiries, or subjects connected with

trade and navigation. The cultivated and enlightened traveller, whose

mind is alike open to the charm of ancient story and the interest of

modern achievement--who is classical without being pedantic, graphic and

yet faithful, enthusiastic and yet accurate, discursive and at the same

time imaginative, is almost unknown amongst us. It will continue to be

so as long as education in our universities is exclusively devoted to

Greek and Latin verses or the higher mathematics; and in academies to

book-keeping and the rule of three; while so broad and sullen a line as

heretofore is drawn between the studies of our scholars and the pursuits

of our practical citizens. To travel to good purpose, requires a mind

stored with much and varied information, in science, statistics,

geography, literature, history, and poetry. To describe what the

traveller has seen, requires, in addition to this, the eye of a painter,

the soul of a poet, and the hand of a practised composer. Probably it

will be deemed no easy matter to find such a combination in any country

or in any age; and most certainly the system of education, neither at

our learned universities nor our commercial academies, is fitted to

produce it.

It is from inattention to the vast store of _previous_ information

requisite to make an accomplished traveller, and still more a writer of

interesting travels, that failures in this branch of literature are so

glaring and so frequent. In other departments of knowledge, a certain

degree of information is felt to be requisite before a man can presume

to write a book. He cannot produce a treatise on mathematics without

knowing at least Euclid, nor a work on history without having read Hume,

nor on political economy without having acquired a smattering of Adam

Smith. But in regard to travels, no previous information is thought to

be requisite. If the person who sets out on a tour has only money in his

pocket, and health to get to his journey's end, he is deemed

sufficiently qualified to come out with his two or three post octavos.

If he is an Honourable, or known at Almack's, so much the better; that

will ensure the sale of the first edition. If he can do nothing else, he

can at least tell the dishes which he got to dinner at the inns, and the

hotels where comfortable beds are to be found. This valuable

information, interspersed with a few descriptions of scenes, copied from

guide-books, and anecdotes picked up at _tables-d'hôte_ or on board

steamboats, constitute the stock in trade of many an adventurer who

embarks in the speculation of paying by publication the expenses of his

travels. We have no individuals in view in these remarks; we speak of

things in general, as they are, or rather have been; for we believe

these ephemeral travels, like other ephemerals, have had their day, and

are fast dying out. The market has become so glutted with them that they

are, in a great many instances, unsaleable.

The classical travellers of England, from Addison to Eustace and Clarke,

constitute an important and valuable body of writers in this branch of

literature, infinitely superior to the fashionable tours which rise up

and disappear like bubbles on the surface of society. It is impossible

to read these elegant productions without feeling the mind overspread

with the charm which arises from the exquisite remains and

heart-stirring associations with which they are filled. But their

interest is almost exclusively classical; they are invaluable to the

accomplished scholar, but they speak in an unknown tongue to the great

mass of men. They see nature only through the medium of antiquity:

beautiful in their allusion to Greek or Roman remains, eloquent in the

descriptions of scenes alluded to in the classical writers, they have

dwelt little on the simple scenes of the unhistoric world. To the great

moral and social questions which now agitate society, and so strongly

move the hearts of the great body of men, they are entire strangers.

Their works are the elegant companions of the scholar or the antiquary,

not the heart-stirring friends of the cottage or the fireside.

Inferior to Britain in the energy and achievements of the travellers

whom she has sent forth, and beyond measure beneath her in the amount of

the addition she has made to geographical science, France is yet greatly

superior, at least of late years, in the literary and scientific

attainments of the wanderers whose works have been given to the world.

Four among these stand pre-eminent, whose works, in very different

styles, are at the head of European literature in this interesting

department--Humboldt, Chateaubriand, Michaud, and Lamartine. Their

styles are so various, and the impression produced by reading them so

distinct, that it is difficult to believe that they have arisen in the

same nation and age of the world.

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.)