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BEAUTIES OF THE BOSPHORUS.

"This is a grand sight, from off the Giant's Grave,
To watch the progress of those rolling seas
Between the Bosphorus, as they lash and lave
Europe and Asia."
BYRON

EVERY enjoyment of life has three distinct stages - anticipation - reality - and reminiscence; and it is more difficult than it at first appears to be, to decide on the comparative extent and value of each. Hope is the most extravagant and imaginative; action, the most engrossing and tangible; and memory, the most calm, and durable, and sober.

I feel this truth forcibly at a moment like the present, when, after having laid aside the pen with which, upon the glorious shores of the Bosphorus, I recorded the observations growing out of passing circumstances, and glowing with reality and action, I am once more called upon mentally to retrace my steps. For months before I visited the picturesque capital of Turkey, I had nourished visions as bright and as impalpable as the rainbow. I anticipated I knew not what - adventures as numerous and as romantic as those of the "Thousand and one Nights;" and I dreamt dreams impossible of accomplishment; not caring to inquire too curiously of my reason whether such things would be; but content to inhabit my cloud-land castle, and to look down from the unstable edifice in all the luxury growing out of my self-created images.

When I was subsequently dwelling in the "City of the Sultan", and that reality had succeeded to anticipation, much of the mist of romance, indeed, rolled away; but the fair face of the landscape suffered little from its absence, for Constantinople needs no aid from the imagination to make one of the brightest gems in the diadem of nature: