ake 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 shado