Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844

VIII

Windsor! henceforth a loftier spell
Invests thy storied walls —
The Bards of future years shall tell
That first within thy halls
Imperial Truth and Mercy met,
And in that hallow'd hour
Gave earth the hope that Peace shall yet
Be dear to Kings as Power.
When France clasp'd England's hand of old
There memory marks the wane
Of iron times, the bad and bold;[45 - The meeting between Francis and Henry took place June 1520, the first great period of civilized progression in Europe – the era of Printing – of Columbus – and of the Reformation.]
Oh, may our Second Field of Gold
A portent still more fair unfold
Of Wisdom's widening reign!

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 - We have translated all the passages ourselves: the versions hitherto published in this country give, as most English translations of French works do, a most imperfect idea of the original.])

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'œuvre 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.)