THE BOSPHORUS.       155

while, in the distance, loom out the dark mountains of the Asian coast, casting their long dusky shadows far across the water; and close beside them are the quivering summits of the tall trees on the edge of the channel, sparkling like silver, and lending the last touch of loveliness to a landscape, perhaps unparalleled in the world.

The Bay of Naples - the fairest and most picturesque points of the Rhine - the approach to sea-seated Venice - the entrance of the Tagus - and the noblest portions of the Danube, have each in turn been quoted as all-excelling, an unsurpassable in natural beauty; but who that has anchored in the Golden Horn, just where beyond the shadow of the Guz-Couli, his eye could wander onward along the channel, will not at once yield the palm to the "rolling seas between the Bosphorus?" Truly, the Bay of Naples boasts its volcanic mountain, which in sublimity must stand unrivalled; but it has not the freshness, the changefulness, the never-ending variety of the Golden Horn; and it, moreover, wants the strait which renders the site of the Moslem city unique in its character. The great German streams, noble and majestic as they may be, are devoid of those lovely breaks and varied vistas which render the Bosphorus so beautiful, and divest it of all tameness and monotony; grandeur and softness vie with each other upon its banks; and it is, moreover, the swift ocean-tide which flows between them, while the shores of the Danube and the Rhine are laved only by the waters of one of its humble tributaries.

And now my pleasant task is ended. I have exhausted the artist's portfolio, and I have nothing left to do, save to take leave of the reader, who has wandered with me in idea under the sunny skies of the fair East.

I have said little - almost nothing, of the inhabitants of the "City of the Sultan;" not because I could not have said much, very much, which might have gratified both them and myself, but because the nature of the present work did not admit of my doing so; and it is only now, at the "eleventh hour," that I permit myself to remark, that the courtesy, kindness, and friedship, which I universally experienced from the natives of the country, and the veneration which I felt for their many virtues, tended greatly to endear t my heart "The Beauties of the Bosphorus."