University of Virginia Library

Shelley's Promotheus.

Our tents were pitched in the vestibule of the house
of Crœsus, on the natural terrace which was once the
imperial site of Sardis. A humpbacked Dutch artist,
who had been in the service of Lady Hester Stanhope
as a draughtsman, and who had lingered about between
Jerusalem and the Nile till he was as much at
home in the East as a Hajji or a crocodile; an Englishman
qualifying himself for “The Travellers';”
a Smyrniote merchant in figs and opium; Job Smith
(my inseprable shadow) and myself, composed a
party at this time, (August, 1834), rambling about
Asia Minor in turbans and Turkish saddles, and pitching
our tents, and cooking our pilau, wherever it
pleased Heaven and the inexorable Suridji who was
our guide and caterer.

I thought at the time that I would compound to
abandon all the romance of that renowned spot, for a
clean shirt and something softer than a marble frustrum

for a pillow; but in the distance of memory, and myself
at this present in a deep morocco chair in the
library at “The Travellers',” that same scene in the
ruins of Sardis does not seem destitute of interest.

It was about four in the lazy summer afternoon.
We had arrived at Sardis at mid-day, and after a
quarrel whether we should eat immediately or wait till
the fashionable hour of three, the wooden dish containing
two chickens buried in a tumulus of rice,
shaped (in compliment to the spirit of the spot) like
the Mound of Alyattis in the plain below, was placed
in the centre of a marble pedestal; and with Job and
the Dutchman seated on the prostrate column dislodged
for our benefit, and the remainder of the party squatted
in the high grass, which grew in the royal palace as if
it had no memory of the foot-prints of the Kings of
Lydia, we spooned away at the saturated rice, and
pulled the smothered chickens to pieces with an independence
of knives and forks that was worthy of the
“certain poor man in Attica.” Old Solon himself,
who stood, we will suppose, while reproving the ostentatious
monarch, at the base of that very column now
ridden astride by an inhabitant of a country of which
he never dreamed,—(at least it strikes me there is no
mention of the Yankees in his philosophy,)—the old
greybeard of the Academy himself, I say, would have
been edified at the primitive simplicity of our repast.
The salt (he would have asked if it was Attic) was
contained in a ragged play-bill, which the Dutchman
had purloined as a specimen of modern Greek, from
the side of a house in Corfu; the mustard was in a
cracked powder-horn, which had been slung at the
breast of old Whalley the regicide, in the American
revolution, and which Job had brought from the Green
Mountains, and held, till its present base uses, in religious
veneration; the ham (I should have mentioned

that respectable entremet before) was half enveloped
in a copy of the “Morning Post;” and the bread,
which had been seven days out from Smyrna, and had
been kept warm in the Suridji's saddle bags twelve
hours in the twenty-four, lay in disjecta membra around
the marble table, with marks of vain but persevering
attacks in its nibbled edges. The luxury of our larder
was comprised in a flask which had once held Harvey's
sauce, and though the last drop had served as a
condiment to a roasted kid some three months before,
in the Acropolis at Athens, we still clung to it with
affectionate remembrance, and it was offered and refused
daily around the table for the melancholy pleasure
of hearing the mention of its name. It was unlucky
that the only thing which the place afforded of the
best quality, and in sufficient quantities, was precisely
the one thing in the world for which no individual of
the party had any particular relish—water! It was
brought in a gourd from the bed of the “golden-sanded
Pactolus,” rippling away to the plain within pistolshot
of the dining-room; but, to the shame of our simplicity
I must record, that a high-shouldered jug of
the rough wine of Samos, trodden out by the feet of
the lovely slaves of the ægean, and bought for a farthing
the bottle, went oftener to the unclassical lips of
the company. Methinks, now, (the wind east in London,
and the day wet and abominable,) I could barter
the dinner that I shall presently discuss, with its suite
of sherries and anchovy, to kneel down by that golden
river in the sunshine, and drink a draught of pure
lymph under the sky of effeminate Asia. Yet, when
I was there—so rarely do we recognise happiness till
she is gone—I wished myself (where I had never been)
in “merry England.” “Merry,” quotha? Scratch
it out, and write comfortable, I have seen none
“merry” in England, save those who have most cause
to be sad—the abandoned of themselves and the
world!

Out of the reach of ladies and the laws of society,
the most refined persons return very much to the natural
instincts from which they have departed in the
progress of civilization. Job rolled off the marble
column when there was nothing more to eat, and went
to sleep with the marks of the Samian wine turning
up the corners of his mouth like the salacious grin of
a satyr. The Dutchman got his hump into a hollow,
and buried his head in the long grass with the same obedience
to the prompting of nature, and idem the Suridji
and the fig-merchant, leaving me seated alone among the
promiscuous ruins of Sardis and the dinner. The
dish of philosophy I had with myself on that occasion
will appear as a rechauffe in my novel; (I intend to
write one;) but meantime I may as well give you the
practical inference; that, as sleeping after dinner is
evidently Nature's law, Washington Irving is highly
excusable for the practice, and he would be a friend of
reason who should introduce couches and coffee at that
somnolent period, the digestive nap taking the place
of the indigestible politics usually forced upon the company
on the disappearance of the ladies. Why should
the world be wedded for ever to these bigoted inconveniences!

The grand track from the south and west of Asia
Minor passes along the plain between the lofty Acropolis
of Sardis and the tombs of her kings; and with
the snore of travellers from five different nations in
my ear, I sat and counted the camels in one of the
immense caravans never out of sight in the valley of
the Hermus. The long procession of those brown
monsters wound slowly past on their way to Smyrna,
their enormous burthens covered with colored trappings
and swaying backward and forward with their disjointed

gait, and their turbaned masters dozing on the
backs of the small asses of the East, leading each a
score by the tether at his back; the tinkling of their
hundred bells swarmed up through the hot air of the
afternoon with the drowsiest of monotones; the native
oleanders, slender-leaved and tall, and just now in all
their glory, with a color in their bright flowers stolen
from the bleeding lips of Houris, brightened the plains
of Lydia like the flush of sunset lying low on the earth;
the black goats of uncounted herds browsed along the
ancient Sarabat, with their bearded faces turned every
one to the faintly coming wind: the eagles (that abound
now in the mountains from which Sardis and a hundred
silent cities once scared their bold progenitors) sailed
slowly and fearlessly around the airy citadel that flung
open its gates to the Lacedæmonian; and, gradually,
as you may have lost yourself in this tangled paragraph
dear reader, my senses became confused among the
objects it enumerates, and I fell asleep with the speech
of Solon in my ears, and my back to the crumbling
portico of Crœsus.

The Dutchman was drawing my picture when I
awoke, the sun was setting, and Job and the Suridji
were making tea. I am not a very picturesque object,
generally speaking, but done as a wild Arab lying at
the base of a column in a white turban, with a stork's
nest over my head, I am not so ill-looking as you would
suppose. As the Dutchman drew for gelt, and hoped
to sell his picture to some traveller at Smyrna who
would take that opportunity to affirm in his book that
he had been at Sardis, (as vide his own sketch,) I do
not despair of seeing myself yet in lithograph. And,
talking of pictures, I would give something now if I
had engaged that hump-backed draughtsman to make
me a sketch of Job, squat on his hams before a fire in
the wall, and making tea in a tin pot with a “malig

nant and turbaned Turk,” feeding the blaze with the
dry thorn of Syria.[1] It would have been consolation
to his respectable mother, whom he left in the Green
Mountains, (wondering what he could have to do with
following such a scapegrace as myself through the
world,) to have seen him in the turban of a Hajji taking
his tea quietly in ancient Lydia. The green turban,
the sign of the Hajji, belonged more properly to
myself; for though it was Job who went bodily to Jerusalem,
(leaving me ill of a fig-fever at Smyrna,) the
sanctity of the pilgrimage by the Mahomedan law falls
on him who provides the pilgrim with scallop-shell and
sandals, aptly figured forth in this case, we will suppose,
by the sixty American dollars paid by myself for
his voyage to Jaffa and back. The Suridji was a
Hajji, too, and it was amusing to see Job, who respected
every man's religious opinions, and had a little
vanity besides in sharing with the Turk[2] the dignity of
a pilgrimage to the sacred city, washing his knees and
elbows at the hour of prayer, and considerately, but
very much to his own inconvenience, transferring the
ham of the unclean beast from the Mussulman's saddlebags
to his own. It was a delicate sacrifice to a pagan's
prejudices worthy of Socrates or a Christian.

2. II.

In all simple states of society, sunset is the hour of
better angels. The traveller in the desert remembers
his home,—the sea-tost boy his mother and her last
words,—the Turk talks, for a wonder, and the chattering
Greek is silent, for the same,—the Italian forgets
his moustache, and hums la patria,—and the Englishman
delivers himself of the society of his companions,
and “takes a walk.” It is something in the influences
of the hour, and I shall take trouble, some day, to
maintain that morn, noon, and midnight have their ministry
as well, and exercise each an unobserved but salutary
and peculiar office on the feelings.

We all separated “after tea;” the Suridji was off to
find a tethering place for his horses; the Englishman
strolled away by himself to a group of the “tents of
Kedar” far down in the valley with their herds and
herdsmen; the Smyrniote merchant sat by the camel-track
at the foot of the hill waiting for the passing of a
caravan; the Green Mountaineer was wandering around
the ruins of the apostolic church; the Dutchman was
sketching the two Ionic shafts of the fair temple of
Cybele; and I, with a passion for running water which
I have elsewhere alluded to, idled by the green bank
of the Pactolus, dreaming sometimes of Gyges and Alexander,
and sometimes of you, dear Mary!

I passed Job on my way, for the four walls over
which the “Angel of the Church of Sardis” kept his
brooding watch in the days of the Apocalypse stand
not far from the swelling bank of the Pactolus, and
nearly in a line between it and the palace of Crœsus. I
must say that my heart almost stood still with awe as I
stepped over the threshold. In the next moment, the
strong and never-wasting under-current of early religious

feeling rushed back on me, and I involuntarily
uncovered my head, and felt myself stricken with the
spell of holy ground. My friend, who was never without
the Bible that was his mother's parting gift, sat on
the end of the broken wall of the vestibule with the sacred
volume open at the Revelations in his hand.

“I think, Philip,” said he, as I stood looking at him
in silence, “I think my mother will have been told by
an angel that I am here.”

He spoke with a solemnity that, spite of every other
feeling, seemed to me as weighty and true as prophecy.

“Listen, Philip,” said he, “it will be something to
tell your mother as well as mine, that we have read the
Apocalypse together in the Church of Sardis.”

I listened with what I never thought to have heard
in Asia—my mother's voice loud at my heart, as I had
heard it in prayer in my childhood:—

“Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have
not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with
me in white: for they are worthy.”

I strolled on. A little farther up the Pactolus stood
the Temple of Cybele. The church to which “He”
spoke “who hath the seven Spirits of God and the seven
stars,” was a small and humble ruin of brick and mortar;
but, of the Temple of the Heathen Mother of the
World, remained two fair columns of marble with their
curiously carved capitals, and the earth around was
strewn with the gigantic frusta of an edifice, stately
even in the fragments of its prostration. I saw for a
moment the religion of Jupiter and of Christ with the
eyes of Crœsus and the philosopher from Athens; and
then I turned to the living nations that I had left to
wander among these dead empires, and looking still
on the eloquent monuments of what these religions
were, thought of them as they are, in wide-spread Christendom!

We visit Rome and Athens, and walk over the ruined
temples of their gods of wood and stone, and take pride
to ourselves that our imaginations awake the “spirit of
the spot.” But the primitive church of Christ, over
which an angel of God kept watch, whose undefiled
members, if there is truth in holy writ, are now “walkking
with him in white” before the face of the Almighty
—a spot on which the Saviour and his Apostles prayed,
and for whose weal, with the other churches of Asia,
the sublime revelation was made to John—this, the
while, is an unvisited shrine, and the “classic” of Pagan
idolatry is dearer to the memories of men than the
holy antiquities of a religion they profess!

3. III.

The Ionic capitals of the two fair columns of the fallen
temple were still tinged with rosy light on the side
towards the sunset, when the full moon, rising in the
east, burnished the other like a shaft of silver. The
two lights mingled in the sky in a twilight of opal.

“Job,” said I, stooping to reach a handful of sand
as we strolled up the western bank of the river, “can
you resolve me why the poets have chosen to call this
pretty stream the `golden-sanded Pactolus?' Did you
ever see sand of a duller grey?”

“As easy as give you a reason,” answered Job “why
we found the turbidus Hermus, yesterday, the clearest
stream we have forded—why I am no more beautiful
than before, though I have bathed like Venus in the
Scamander—why the pumice of Naxos no longer reduces
the female bust to its virgin proportions—and why
Smyrna and Malta are not the best places for figs and
oranges!”

“And why the old King of Lydia, who possessed
the invisible ring, and kept a devil in his dog's collar,

lies quietly under the earth in the plain below us, and
his ring and his devil were not bequeathed to his successors.
What a pleasant auxiliary to sin must have
been that invisible ring! Spirit of Gyges, thrust thy
finger out of the earth, and commit it once more to a
mortal! Sit down, my dear monster, and let us speculate
in this bright moonshine on the enormities we
would commit.”

As Job was proceeding, in a cautious periphrasis, to
rebuke my irreverent familiarity with the Prince of
Darkness and his works, the twilight had deepened, and
my eye was caught by a steady light twinkling far
above us in the ascending bed of the river. The green
valley wound down from the rear of the Acropolis, and
the single frowning tower stood in broken and strong
relief against the sky, and from the mass of shadow below
peered out, like a star from a cloud-rack, the steady
blaze of a lamp.

“Allons! Job!” said I, making sure of an adventure,
“let us see for whose pleasure a lamp is lit in the
solitude of this ruined city.”

“I could not answer to your honored mother,” said
my scrupulous friend, “if I did not remind you that
this is a spot much frequented by robbers, and that
probably no honest man harbors at that inconvenient
altitude.”

I made a leap over a half-buried frieze that had served
me as a pillow, and commenced the ascent.

“I could as ill answer to your anxious parent,” said
Job, following with uncommon alacrity, “if I did not
partake your dangers when they are inevitable.”

We scrambled up with some difficulty in the darkness,
now rolling into an unseen hollow, now stumbling
over a block of marble, held fast one moment by the
lacerating hooked thorn of Syria, and the next brought
to a stand-still by impenetrable thickets of brushwood.

With a half-hour's toil, however, we stood on a clear
platform of grass, panting and hot, and as I was suggesting
to Job that we had possibly got too high, he
laid his hand on my arm, and, with a sign of silence,
drew me down on the grass beside him.

In a small fairy amphitheatre, half-encircled by a
bend of the Pactolus, and lying a few feet below the
small platform from which we looked, lay six low tents,
disposed in a crescent opposite to that of the stream,
and enclosing a circular area of bright and dewy grass,
of scarce ten feet in diameter. The tents were round,
and laced neatly with wicker work, with their curtain
doors opening inward upon the circle. In the largest
one, which faced nearly down the valley, hung a small
iron lamp of an antique shape, with a wick alight in
one of its two projecting extremities, and beneath it
swung a basket cradle suspended between two stakes,
and kept in motion by a woman apparently of about
forty, whose beauty, but for another more attractive object,
would have rewarded us alone for our toil. The
other tents were closed, and seemed unoccupied, but the
curtain of the one into which our eyes were now straining
with intense eagerness, was looped entirely back to
give admission to the cool night-air, and, in and out,
between the light of the lamp and the full moon, stole
on naked feet a girl of fifteen, whose exqisite symmetry
and unconscious but divine grace of movement filled
my sense of beauty as it had never been filled by the
divinest chisel of the Tribune. She was of the height
and mould of the younger water-nymph in Gibson's
Hylas,[3] with limbs and lips that, had I created and
warmed her to life like Pygmalion, I should have just

hesitated whether or not they wanted another half-shade
of fulness. The large shawl of the East, which
was attached to her girdle, and in more guarded hours
concealed all but her eyes, hung in loose folds from her
waist to her heels, leaving her bust and smoothly-rounded
shoulders entirely bare; and, in strong relief
even upon her clear brown skin, the flakes of her glossy
and raven hair floated over her back, and swept around
her with a grace of a cloud in her indolent motions. A
short petticoat of striped Brusa silk stretched to her
knees, and below appeared the full trowser of the East,
of the same material, narrowed at the ankle, and bound
with what looked in the moonlight an anklet of silver.
A profusion of rings on her fingers, and a gold sequin
on her forehead, suspended from a colored fillet, completed
her dress, and left nothing to be added by the
prude or the painter. She was at that ravishing and
divinest moment of female life, when almost the next
hour would complete her womanhood—like the lotus
ere it lays back to the prying moonlight the snowy leaf
nearest its heart.

She was employed in filling a large jar which stood
at the back of the tent, with water from the Pactolus,
and as she turned with her emptied pitcher, and came
under the full blaze of the lamp in her way outward,
treading lightly lest she should disturb the slumber of
the child in the cradle, and pressing her two round
hands closely to the sides of the vessel, the gradual compression
of my arm by the bony hand which still held
it for sympathy, satisfied me that my own leaping pulse
of admiration found an answering beat in the bosom of
my friend. A silent nod from the woman, whose Greek
profile was turned to us under the lamplight, informed
the lovely water-bearer that her labors were at an end;
and with a gesture expressive of heat, she drew out the
shawl from her girdle, untied the short petticoat, and

threw them aside, and then tripping out into the moonlight,
with only the full silken trowsers from her waist
to her ankles, she sat down on the brink of the small
stream, and with her feet in the water, dropped her
head on her knees, and sat as motionless as marble.

“Gibson should see her now,” I whispered to Job,
“with the glance of the moonlight on that dimpled and
polished back, and her almost glittering hair veiling
about her in such masses, like folds of gossamer!”

“And those slender fingers clasped over her knees,
and the air of melancholy repose which is breathed into
her attitude, and which seems inseparable from those
indolent Asiatics. She is probably a gipsy.”

The noise of the water dashing over a small cascade
a little farther up the stream had covered our approach
and rendered our whispers inaudible. Job's conjecture
was probably right, and we had stumbled on a small
encampment of gipsies,—the men possibly asleep in
those closed tents, or possibly absent at Smyrna. After
a little consultation, I agreed with Job that it would be
impolitic to alarm the camp at night, and resolving on
a visit in the morning, we quietly and unobserved withdrew
from our position, and descended to our own tents
in the ruins of the palace.

4. IV.

The Suridji had given us our spiced coffee in the
small china cups and filagree holders, and we sat discussing,
to the great annoyance of the storks over our
heads, whether we should loiter another day at Sardis,
or eat melons at noon at Casabar on our way to Constantinople.
To the very great surprise of the Dutchman,
who wished to stay to finish his drawings, Job and
myself voted for remaining—a view of the subject which
was in direct contradiction to our vote of the preceding
evening. The Englishman, who was always in a hurry,

flew into a passion, and went off with the phlegmatic
Suridji to look after his horse, and having disposed of our
Smyrniote, by seeing a caravan (which was not to be
seen) coming southward from Mount Tmolus, I and my
monster started for the encampment of the gipsies.

As we rounded the battered wall of the Christian
church, a woman stepped out from the shadow. Through
a tattered dress, and under a turban of soiled cotton set
far over her forehead, and throwing a deep shadow into
her eyes, I recognized at once the gipsy woman whom
we had seen sitting by the cradle.

“Buon giorno, Signori,” she said, making a kind of
salaam, and relieving me at once by the Italian salutation
of my fears of being unintelligible.

Job gave her the good morning, but she looked at
him with a very unsatisfactory glance, and coming close
to my car, she wished me to speak to her out of the
hearing of “il mio domestico!”

“Amico piu tosto!” I added immediately with a consideration
for Job's feelings, which, I must do myself the
justice to say, I always manifested, except in very elegant
society. I gave myself the greater credit in this
case, as, in my impatience to know the nature of the gipsy's
communication, I might be excused for caring little
at the moment whether my friend was taken for a gentleman
or a gentleman's gentleman.

The gipsy looked vexed at her mistake, and with a
half-apologetic inclination to Job, she drew me into the
shade of the ruin, and perused my face with great earnestness.
The same to yourself, thought I, as I gave
back her glance, and searched for her meaning in two
as liquid and loving eyes as ever looked out of the gates
of the Prophet's Paradise for the coming of a young
believer. It was a face that had been divine, and in the
hands of a lady of fashion would have still made a bello
rifacimento.

“Inglese?” she said at last.

“No, Madre—Americano.”

She looked disappointed.

“And where are you going, filio mio?”

“To Stamboul.”

“Benissimo!” she answered, and her face brightened.
“Do you want a servant?”

“Unless it is yourself, no!”

“It is my son.”

It was on my lips to ask if he was like her daughter,
but an air of uneasiness and mystery in her manner put
me on the reserve, and I kept my knowledge to myself.
She persevered in her suit, and at last the truth came
out, that her boy was bound on an errand to Constantinople,
and she wished safe-conduct for him. The rest
of the troop, she said, were at Smyrna, and she was left
in care of the tents with the boy and an infant child. As
she did not mention the girl, who, from the resemblance,
was evidently her daughter—I thought it unwise to
allude to our discovery, and promising that, if the boy
was mounted, every possible care should be taken of
him, I told her the hour on the following morning
when we should be in the saddle, and rid myself of her
with the intention of stealing a march on the camp.

I took rather a circuitous route, but the gipsy was
there before me, and apparently alone. She had sent
the boy to the plains for a horse, and though I presumed
that the loveliest creature in Asia was concealed
in one or the other of those small tents, the curtains
were closely tied, and I could find no apology for intruding
either my eyes or my inquiries. The handsome
Zingara, too, began to look rather becomingly
fiere, and as I had left Job behind, and was always
naturally afraid of a woman, I reluctantly felt myself
under the necessity of comprehending her last injunction,

and with a promise that the boy should join us
before we reached the foot of Mount Sypilus, she fairly
bowed me off the premises. I could have forsworn
my complexion and studied palmistry for a gipsy, had
the devil then tempted me!

5. V.

We struck our tents at sun-rise, and were soon
dashing on through the oleanders upon the broad plain
of the Hermus, the dew lying upon their bright vermeil
flowers like the pellucid gum on the petals of the
ice-plant, and nature, and my five companions, in their
gayest humor. I was not. My thoughts were of
moonlight and the Pactolus, and two round feet ankle-deep
in running water. Job rode up to my side.

“My dear Phil! take notice that you are nearing
Mount Sypilus, in which the magnetic ore was first
discovered.”

“It acts negatively on me, my dear chum! for I
drag a lengthening chain from the other direction.”

Silence once more, and the bright red flowers still
fled backward in our career. Job rode up again.

“You must excuse my interrupting your reverie, but
I thought you would like to know that the town where
we sleep to night is the residence of the `Beys of Oglou,'
mentioned in the `Bride of Abydos.”'

No answer, and the bright red blossoms still flew
scattered in our path as our steeds flew through the
coppice, and the shovel-like blades of the Turkish
stirrups cut into them right and left in the irregular
gallop. Job rode again to my side.

“My dear Philip, did you know that this town of
Magnesia was once the capital of the Turkish empire
—the city of Timour the Tartar?”

“Well!”

“And did you know that when Themistocles was
in exile, and Artaxerxes presented him with the tribute
of three cities to provide the necessaries of life,
Magnesia[4] found him in bread?”

“And Lampascus in wine. Don't bore me, Job!”

We sped on. As we neared Casabar toward noon,
and (spite of romance) I was beginning to think with
complacency upon the melons, for which the town is
famous, a rattling of hoofs behind put our horses upon
their mettle, and in another moment a boy dashed into
the midst of our troop, and reining up with a fine display
of horsemanship, put the promised token into my
hand. He was mounted on a small Arabian mare, remarkable
for nothing but a thin and fiery nostril, and
a most lavish action, and his jacket and turban were
fitted to a shape and head that could not well be disguised.
The beauty of the gipsy camp was beside me!

It was as well for my self-command that I had sworn
Job to secrecy in case of the boy's joining us, and
that I had given the elder gipsy, as a token, a very
voluminous and closely-written letter of my mother's.
In the twenty minutes which the reading of so apparently
“lengthy” a document would occupy, I had
leisure to resume my self-control, and resolve on my
own course of conduct toward the fair masquerader.
My travelling companions were not a little astonished
to see me receive a letter by courier in the heart of
Asia, but that was for their own digestion. All the
information I condescended to give was, that the boy
was sent to my charge on his road to Constantinople;
and as Job displayed no astonishment, and entered

simply into my arrangements, and I was the only person
in the company who could communicate with the
Suridji, (I had picked up a little modern Greek in the
Morea,) they were compelled (the Dutchman, John
Bull, and the fig-merchant) to content themselves with
such theories on the subject as Heaven might supply
them withal.

How Job and myself speculated apart on what could
be the errand of this fair creature to Constantinople—
how beautifully she rode and sustained her character
as a boy—how I requested her, though she spoke Italian
like her mother, never to open her lips in any
Christian language to my companions—how she slept
at my feet at the khans, and rode at my side on the
journey, and, at the end of seven days, arriving at Scutari,
and beholding across the Bosphorus the golden
spires of Stamboul, how she looked at me with tears
in her unfathomable eyes, and spurred her fleet Arab
to his speed to conceal her emotion, and how I felt
that I could bury myself with her in the Vizier's tomb
we were passing at the moment, and be fed on rice
with a goule's bodkin, if so alone we might not be
parted—all these are matters which would make sundry
respectable chapters in a novel, but of which you
are spared the particulars in a true story. There was
a convenience both to the dramatist and the audience
in the “cetera intus agentus” of the Romans.

6. VI.

We emerged from the pinnacled cypresses of the
cemetery overlooking Constantinople, and dismounting
from my horse, I climbed upon the gilded turban
crowning the mausoleum of a royal Ichoglan, (a sultan's
page, honored more in his burial than in his life,)
and feasted my eyes on the desecrated but princely-fair
birth-right of the Palæologi. The Nekropolis—

the city of the dead—on the outermost tomb of whose
gloomy precincts I had profanely mounted, stands
high and black over the Bosphorus on one side, while
on the other, upon similar eminences, stand the gleaming
minarets and latticed gardens of a matchless city
of the living—as if, while Europe flung up her laughing
and breathing child to the sun, expiring Asia, the
bereaved Empress of the world, lifted her head to the
same heavens in majestic and speechless sorrow.

But oh! how fairer than Venice in her waters,—
than Florence and Rome in their hills and habitations,
than all the cities of the world in that which is most
their pride and glory,—is this fairest metropolis of the
Mahomets! With its two hundred mosques, each
with a golden sheaf of minarets laying their pointed
fingers against the stars, and encircled with the fretted
galleries of the callers to prayer, like the hand of a
cardinal with its costly ring,—with its seraglio gardens
washed on one side by the sea, and on the other by the
gentle stream that glides out of the “Valley of Sweet
Waters;”—men-of-war on one side, flaunting their red
pennants over the nightingale's nest which sings for
the delight of a princess, and the swift caique on the
other gliding in protected waters, where the same imprisoned
fair one might fling into it a flower, (so slender
is the dividing cape that shuts in the bay,)—with
its Bosphorus, its radiant and unmatched Bosphorus—
the most richly-gemmed river within the span of the
sun, extending with its fringe of palaces and castles
from sea to sea, and reflecting in its glassy eddies a
pomp and sumptuousness of costume and architecture
which exceeds even your boyish dreams of Bagdad
and the caliphs—Constantinople, I say, with its turbaned
and bright-garmented population,—its swarming
sea and rivers,—its columns, and aqueducts, and
strange ships of the East,—its impenetrable seraglio,
and its close-shuttered harems,—its bezestein and its

Hippodrome,—Constantinople lay before me! If the
star I had worshipped had descended to my hand out
of the sky,—if my unapproachable and yearning dream
of woman's beauty had been bodied forth warm and
real—if the missing star in the heel of Serpentarius,
and the lost sister of the Pleiades had waltzed back
together to their places,—if poets were once more
prophets, not felons, and books were read for the good
that is in them, not for the evil,—if Love and Truth
had been seen again, or any impossible or improbable
thing had come to pass,—I should not have felt more
thrillingly than now the emotions of surprise and wonder!

While I stood upon the marble turban of the Ichoglan,
my companions had descended the streets of
Scutari, and I was left alone with the gipsy. She sat
on her Arab with her head bowed to his neck, and
when I withdrew my eye from the scene I have faintly
described, the tear-drops were glistening in the flowing
mane, and her breast was heaving under her embroidered
jacket with uncontrollable grief. I jumped
to the ground, and taking her head between my hands,
pressed her wet cheek to my lips.

“We part here, Signor,” said she, winding around
her head the masses of hair that had escaped from her
turban, and raising herself in the saddle as if to go on.

“I hope not, Maimuna!”

She bent her moist eyes on me with a look of earnest
inquiry.

“You are forbidden to intrust me with your errand
to Constantinople, and you have kept your word to
your mother. But, whatever that errand may be, I
hope it does not involve your personal liberty?”

She looked embarrassed, but did not answer.

“You are very young to be trusted so far from your
mother, Maimuna!”

“Signor, si!”

“But I think she can scarce have loved you so well
as I do to have suffered you to come here alone!”

“She intrusted me to you, Signor.”

I was well reminded of my promise. I had given
my word to the gipsy that I would leave her child at
the Persian fountain of Tophana. Maimuna was
evidently under a control stronger than the love I half-hoped
and half-feared I had awakened.

“Andiamo!” she said, dropping her head upon her
bosom with the tears pouring once more over it like
rain; and driving her stirrups with abandoned energy
into the sides of her Arabian, she dashed headlong
down the uneven streets of Scutari, and in a few minutes
we stood on the limit of Asia.

We left our horses in the “silver city,”[5] crossing to
the “golden” in a caique, and with Maimuna in my
bosom, and every contending emotion at work in my
heart, the scene about me still made an indelible impression
on my memory. The star-shaped bay, a
mile perhaps in diameter, was one swarm of boats of
every most slender and graceful form, the caikjis, in
their silken shirts and vari-colored turbans, driving
them through the water with a speed and skill which
put to shame the gondolier of Venice, and almost the
Indian in his canoe; the gilded lattices and belvideres
of the seraglio, and the cypresses and flowering trees
that mingle their gay and sad foliage above them, were
already so near that I could count the roses upon the
bars, and see the moving of the trees in the evening
wind; the muezzins were calling to sunset-prayer,
their voices coming clear and prolonged over the
water; the men-of-war in the mouth of the Bosphorus
were lowering their blood-red flags; the shore we

were approaching was thronged with veiled women,
and bearded old men, and boys with the yellow slipper
and red skull-cap of the East; and, watching our approach,
stood apart, a group of Jews and Armenians,
marked by their costume for an inferior race, but looking
to my cosmopolite eye as noble in their black robes
and towering caps as the haughty Mussulman that
stood aloof from their company.

We set foot in Constantinople. It was the suburb
of Tophana, and the Suridji pointed out to Maimuna,
as we landed, a fountain of inlaid marble and brass,
around whose projecting frieze were traced inscriptions
in the Persian. She sprang to my hand.

“Remember, Maimuna!” I said, “that I offer you
a mother and a home in another and a happier land.
I will not interfere with your duty, but when your errand
is done, you may find me if you will. Farewell.”

With a passionate kiss in the palm of my hand, and
one beaming look of love and sorrow in her large and
lustrous eyes, the gipsy turned to the fountain, and
striking suddenly to the left around the mosque of
Sultan Selim, she plunged into the narrow street running
along the water-side to Galata.

7. VII.

We had wandered out from our semi-European,
semi-Turkish lodgings on the third morning after our
arrival at Constantinople, and picking our way listlessly
over the bad pavement of the suburb of Pera,
stood at last in the small burying-ground at the summit
of the hill, disputing amicably upon what quarter
of the fair city beneath us we should bestow our share
in the bliss of that June morning.

“It is a heavenly day,” said Job, sitting down unthinkingly
upon a large sculptured turban that formed
the head-stone to the grave of some once-wealthy

Pagan, and looking off wistfully toward the green
summit of Bulgurlu.

The difference between Job and myself was a mania,
on his part for green fields, and on mine for human
faces. I knew very well that his remark was a leader
to some proposition for a stroll over the wilder hills of
the Bosphorus, and I was determined that he should
enjoy, instead, the pleasure of sympathy in my nevertiring
amusement of wandering in the crowded bazaars
on the other side of the water. The only way to accomplish
it, was to appear to yield the point, and then
rally upon his generosity. I had that delicacy for his
feelings (I had brought him all the way from the Green
Mountains at my own expense) never to carry my
measures too ostentatiously.

Job was looking south, and my face was as resolutely
turned north. We must take a caique in
any case at Galata, (lying just below us) but if we
turned the prow south in the first instance, farewell at
every stroke to the city! Whereas a northern course
took us straight up the Golden Horn, and I could appear
to change my mind at any moment, and land immediately
in a street leading to the bazaars. Luckily,
while I was devising an errand to go up the channel
instead of down, a small red flag appeared gliding
through the forest of masts around the curve of the
water-side at Tophana, and, in a moment more, a
high-pooped vessel, with the carved railings and out-landish
rigging of the ships from the far East, shot out
into the middle of the bay with the strong current of
the Bosphorus, and squaring her lattine sail, she
rounded a vessel lying at anchor with the flag of Palestine,
and steered with a fair wind up the channel of the
Golden Horn. A second look at her deck disclosed
to me a crowd of people, mostly women, standing
amid-ships, and the supposition with which I was about

inducing Job to take a caique and pull up the harbor
after her seemed to me now almost a certainty.

“It is a slave-ship from Trebizond, ten to one, my
dear Job!”

He slid off the marble turban which he had profaned
so unscrupulously, and the next minute we
passed the gate that divides the European from the
commercial suburb, and were plunging down the steep
and narrow straits of Galata with a haste that, to the
slippered and shuffling Turks we met or left behind,
seemed probably little short of madness. Of a hundred
slender and tossing caiques lying in the disturbed
waters of the bay, we selected the slenderest and best
manned; and getting Job in with the usual imminent
danger of driving his long legs through the bottom of
the egg-shell craft, we took in one of the obsequious
Jews who swarm about the pier as interpreters, coiled
our legs under us in the hollow womb of the caique,
and shot away like a nautilus after the slaver.

The deep-lying river that coils around the throbbing
heart of Constantinople is a place of as delicate navigation
as a Venetian lagoon on a festa, or a soiree of
middling authors. The Turk, like your plain-spoken
friend, rows backward, and with ten thousand eggshells
swarming about him in every direction, and his
own prow rounded off in a pretty iron point, an extra
piastre for speed draws down curses on the caikji and
the Christian dogs who pay him for the holes he lets
into his neighbors' boats, which is only equalled in bitterness
and profusion by the execrations which follow
what is called “speaking your mind.” The Jew
laughed, as Jews do since Shylock, at the misfortunes
of his oppressors; and, in the exercise of his vocation,
translated us the oaths as they came in right and left
—most of them very gratuitous attacks on those, (as
Job gravely remarked,) of whom they could know
very little,—our respected mothers.

The slackening vessel lost her way as she got opposite
the bazaar of dried fruits, and, as her yards came
down by the run, she put up her helm, and ran her
towering prow between a piratical-looking Egyptian
craft, and a black and bluff English collier, inscribed
appropriately on the stern as the “Snow-drop” from
Newcastle. Down plumped her anchor, and in the
next moment the Jew hailed her by our orders, and
my conjecture was proved to be right. She was from
Trebizond, with slaves and spices.

“What would they do if we were to climb up her
side?” I asked of the Israelite.

He stretched up his crouching neck till his twisted
beard hung clear off like a waterfall from his chin,
and looked through the carved railing very intently.

“The slaves are Georgians,” he answered, after
awhile, “and if there were no Turkish purchasers on
board, they might simply order you down again.”

“And if there were—”

“The women would be considered damaged by a
Christian eye, and the slave merchant might shoot you
or pitch you overboard.”

“Is that all?” said Job, evolving his length very
deliberately from its coil, and offering me a hand the
next moment from the deck of the slaver. Whether
the precedence he took in all dangers arose from affection
for me, or from a praiseworthy indifference to the
fate of such a trumpery collection as his own body and
limbs, I have never decided to my own satisfaction.

In the confusion of port-officers and boats alongside,
all hailing and crying out together, we stood on the
outer side of the deck unobserved, and I was soon intently
occupied in watching the surprise and wonder
of the pretty toys who found themselves for the first
time in the heart of a great city. The owner of their
charms, whichever of a dozen villanous Turks I saw
about them it might be, had no time to pay them very

particular attention, and dropping their dirty veils
about their shoulders, they stood open-mouthed and
staring—ten or twelve rosy damsels in their teens, with
eyes as deep as a well, and almost as large and liquid.
Their features were all good, their skins without a
flaw, hair abundant, and figures of a healthy plumpness—looking,
with the exception of their eyes, which
were very oriental and magnificent, like the great, fat,
pie-eating, yawning, boarding-school misses one sees
over a hedge at Hampstead. It was delicious to see
their excessive astonishment at the splendors of the
Golden Horn—they from the desert mountains of
Georgia or Circassia, and the scene about them,
(mosques, minarets, people, and men-of-war all together,)
probably the most brilliant and striking in the
world. I was busy following their eyes and trying to
divine their impressions, when Job seized me by the
arm. An old Turk had just entered the vessel from
the land-side, and was assisting a closely-veiled female
to mount after him. Half a glance satisfied me that it
was the Gipsy of Sardis—the lovely companion of our
journey to Constantinople.

“Maimuna!” I exclaimed, darting forward on the
instant.

A heavy hand struck me back as I touched her, and
as I returned the blow, the swarthy crew of Arabs
closed about us, and we were hurried with a most unceremonious
haste to the side of the vessel. I scarce
know, between my indignation and the stunning effect
of the blow I had received, how I got into the caique,
but we were pulling fast up the Golden Horn by the
time I could speak, and in half an hour were set ashore
on the green bank of the Barbyses, bound on a solitary
ramble up the Valley of Sweet Waters.

8. VIII.

The art of printing was introduced into the Mohammedan
Empire in the reigns of Achmet III. and
Louis XV. I seldom state a statistical fact, but this is
one I happen to know, and I mention it because the
most fanciful and romantic abode with which I am acquainted
in the world was originally built to contain
the first printing-press brought from the Court of Versailles
by Mehemet Effendi, Ambassador from the
“Brother of the Sun.” It is now a maison de plaisance
for the Sultan's favorite women, and in all the
dreams of perfect felicity which visit those who have
once seen it, it rises as the Paradise of retreats from
the world.

The serai of Khyat-Khana is a building of gold
and marble, dropped down unfenced upon the greensward
in the middle of a long emerald valley, more
like some fairy vision, conjured and forgotten to be
dissolved, than a house to live in, real, weather-proof,
and to be seen for the value of one and sixpence. The
Barbyses falls over the lip of a sea-shell, (a marble
cascade sculptured in that pretty device,) sending up
its spray and its perpetual music close under the gilded
lattice of the Sultana, and, following it back with the
eye, like a silver thread in a broidery of green velvet,
it comes stealing down through miles of the tenderest
verdure, without tree or shrub upon its borders, but
shut in with the seclusion of an enchanted stream and
valley by mountains which rise in abrupt precipices
from the edges of its carpet of grass, and fling their
irregular shadows across it at every hour save high
noon—sacred in the East to the sleep of beauty and
idleness.

In the loving month of May it is death to set foot in
the Khyat-Khana. The ascending caique is stopped

in the Golden Horn, and on the point of every hill is
stationed a mounted eunuch with drawn sabre. The
Arab steeds of the Sultan are picketed on the low-lying
grass of the valley, and his hundred Circassians
come from their perfumed chambers in the seraglio,
and sun their untold loveliness on the velvet banks of
the Barbyses. From the Golden Horn to Belgrade,
twelve miles of greensward, (sheltered like a vein of
ore in the bosom of the earth, and winding away after
the course of that pebbly river, unseen, save by the
eye of the sun and stars,) are sacred in this passion-born
month from the foot of man, and, riding in their
scarlet arubas with the many-colored ribbons floating
back from the horns of their bullocks, and their own
snowy veils dropped from their guarded shoulders and
deep-dyed lips, wander, from sunrise to sunset, these
caged birds of a Sultan's delight, longing as wildly,
(who shall doubt?) to pass that guarded barrier into
the forbidden world, as we, who sigh for them without,
to fly from falsehood and wrong, and forget that same
world in their bosoms!

How few are content! How restless are even the
most spoiled children of Fortune! How inevitably
the heart sighs for that which it has not, even though
its only want is a cloud on its perpetual sunshine!
We were not of those—Job and I—for we were of
that school of philosophers[6] who “had little and
wanted nothing;” but we agreed, as we sat upon the
marble bridge sprung like a wind-lifted cobweb over
the Barbyses, that the envy of a human heart would
poison even the content of a beggar! He is a fool
who is sheltered from hunger and cold and still complains
of fortune; but he is only not a slave or a seraph,

who, feeling on the innermost fibre of his sensibility the
icy breath of Malice, utters his eternal malison on the
fiend who can neither be grappled with nor avoided.
I could make a paradise with loveliness and sunshine,
if Envy could be forbidden at the gate!

We had walked around the Serai and tried all its
entrances in vain, when Job spied, under the shelter
of the southern hill, a blood-red flag flying at the top
of a small tent of the Prophet's green—doubtless concealing
the Kervas, who kept his lonely guard over
the precincts. I sent my friend with a “pinch of piastres”
to tempt the trowsered infidel to our will, and
he soon came shuffling in his unmilitary slippers, with
keys, which, the month before, were guarded like the
lamp of Aladdin. We entered. We rambled over
the chambers of the chosen Houris of the East; we
looked through their lattices, and laid the palms of
our hands on the silken cushions dimmed in oval spots
by the moisture of their cheeks as they slept; we could
see by the tarnished gold, breast-high at the windows,
where they had pressed to the slender lattices to look
forth upon the valley; and Job, more watchfully alive
to the thrilling traces of beauty, showed me in the diamond-shaped
bars the marks of their moist fingers and
the stain as of lips between, betraying where they had
clung and laid their faces against the trellice in the indolent
attitude of gazers from a wearisome prison.
Mirrors and ottomans were the only furniture; and
never, for me, would the wand of Cornelius Agrippa
have been more welcome, than to wave back into
those senseless mirrors the images of beauty they had
lost.

I sat down on a raised corner of the divan, probably
the privileged seat of the favorite of the hour. Job
stood with his lips apart, brooding in speechless poeticalness
on his own thoughts.

“Do you think, after all,” said I, reverting to the
matter-of-fact vein of my own mind, which was paramount
usually to the romantic; “do you think really,
Job, that the Zuleikas and Fatimas who have by turns
pressed this silken cushion with their crossed feet were
not probably inferior in attraction to the most third-rate
belle of New-England? How long would you
love a woman that could neither read, nor write, nor
think five minutes on any given theme? The utmost
exertion of intellect in the loveliest of these deep-eyed
Circassians is probably the language of flowers, and,
good heavens! think how one of your della Cruscan
sentiments would be lost upon her! And yet here you
are, ready to go mad with romantic fancies about
women that were never taught even their letters.”

Job began to hum a stave of his favorite song,
which was always a sign that he was vexed and disenchanted
of himself.

“How little women think,” said I, proceeding with
my unsentimental vein, while Job looked out of the
window and the Kervas smoked his pipe on the Sultana's
ottoman; “how little women think that the
birch and the dark closet, and the thumbed and dogeared
spelling-book, (or whatever else more refined
torments their tender years in the shape of education,)
was, after all, the ground-work and secret of their fascination
over men! What a process it is to arrive at
love! `D-o-g, dog,—c-a-t,cat!' If you had not
learned this, bright Lady Melicent, I fear Captain Augustus
Fitz-Somerset would never have sat, as I saw
him last night, cutting your initials with a diamond
ring on the purple claret-glass which had just poured
a bumper to your beauty!”

“You are not far wrong,” said Job, after a long
pause, during which I had delivered myself, unheard,
of the above practical apostrophe; “you are not far

wrong, quoad the women of New-England. They
would be considerable bores if they had not learned,
in their days of bread-and-butter, to read, write, and
reason. But, for the woman of the softer South and
East, I am by no means clear that education would
not be inconsistent with the genius of the clime. Take
yourself back to Italy, for example, where, for two
mortal years, you philandered up and down between
Venice and Amalfi, never out of the sunshine or away
from the feet of women, and, in all that precious episode
of your youth, never guilty, I will venture to presume,
of either suggesting or expressing a new thought.
And the reason is, not that the imagination is dull, but
that nobody thinks, except upon exigency, in these
latitudes. It would be violent and inapt to the spirit
of the hour. Indolence, voluptuous indolence of body
and mind, (the latter at the same time lying broad
awake in its chamber, and alive to every pleasurable
image that passes uncalled before its windows,) is the
genius, the only genius, of the night and day. What
would be so discordant as an argument by moonlight
in the Coliseum? What so ill-bred and atrocious as
the destruction by logic of the most loose-spun theory
by the murmuring fountains of the Pamfili? To live
is enough in these lands of the sun. But merely to live,
in ours, is to be bound, Prometheus-like, to a rock,
with a vulture at our vitals. Even in the most passionate
intercourse of love in your northern clime, you
read to your mistress, or she sings to you, or you think
it necessary to drive or ride; but I know nothing that
would more have astonished your Venetian bionda
than, when the lamp was lit in the gondola that you
might see her beauty on the lagune in the starless
night, to have pulled a book from your pocket, and
read even a tale of love from Boccaccio. And that is
why I could be more content to be a pipe-bearer in
Asia than a schoolmaster in Vermont, or, sooner than
a judge's ermine in England, to wear a scrivener's
rags, and sit in the shade of a portico, writing love-letters
for the peasant-girls of Rome. Talk of republics,
—your only land of equality is that in which to breathe
is the supreme happiness. The monarch throws open
his window for the air that comes to him past the brow
of a lazzaroni, and the wine on the patrician's lip intoxicates
less than the water from the fountain that is
free to all, though it gush from the marble bosom of a
nymph. If I were to make a world, I would have the
climate of Greece, and no knowledge that did not
come by intuition. Men and women should grow
wise enough, as the flowers grow fair enough, with
sunshine and air, and they should follow their instincts
like the birds, and go from sweet to sweet with as little
reason or trouble. Exertion should be a misdemeanor,
and desire of action, if it were not too monstrous
to require legislation, should be treason to the
state.”

“Long live King Job!”