still
finds before him many a dreary mile of road between marshalled tombs and
mournful cypresses, ere he reaches his journey's seemingly receding end;
and yet, every year does this common patrimony of all the heirs to decay,
still exhibit a rapidly increasing size, a fresh and wider line of
boundary, and a new belt of young plantations, growing up between new
flower beds of graves.

"There, said I to myself, lie, scarcely one foot beneath the surface of a
swelling soil, ready to burst at every point with its festering contents,
more than half the generations whom death has continued to mow down for
nearly four centuries in the vast capital of Islamism. There lie, side by
side, on the same level, in cells the size of their bodies, and only
distinguished by a marble turban somewhat longer or deeper--somewhat
rounder or squarer--personages, in life, far as heaven and earth asunder,
in birth, in station, in gifts of nature, and in long laboured
acquirements. There lie, sunk alike in their last sleep--alike food for
the worm that lives on death--the conqueror who filled the universe with
his name, and the peasant scarcely known in his own hamlet; Sultan Mahmoud,
and Sultan Mahmoud's perhaps more deserving horse;[4] elders bending under
the weight of years, and infants of a single hour; men with intellects of
angels, and men with understandings inferior to those of brutes; the
beauty of Georgia and the black of Sennaar; visiers, beggars, heroes, and
women.'"

The approach to Constantinople from the sea of Marmora is likewise thus
beautifully described by the same author, and will form an appropriate
conclusion:

"With eyes rivetted on the expanding splendour, I watched as they came out
of the bosom of the surrounding waters, the pointed minarets, the swelling
cupolas, and the innumerable habitations, either stretching along the
jagged shore, and reflecting their shape in the mirror of the deep, or
creeping up the crested mountain, and tracing their outline on the expanse
of the sky. At first agglomerated in a single confused mass, the lesser
part of this immense whole seemed, as we advanced, by degrees to unfold, to
disengage themselves from each other, and to grow into various groups,
divided by wide chasms and deep indentures; until at last the clusters,
thus far still distantly connected, became transformed, as if by magic,
into three distinct cities, each individually of prodigious extent, and
each separated from th