reasoned. Landing, and sensing the decay around him, he exclaimed, "The Greeks of to-day are ancient Greeks no more! What wrought the change?" "Ask dead priests!" solemnly whispered a spirit by his side. He stood before the Acropolis at Athens, passed up the propillion, or grand entrance, and surveyed Mars Hill, where Paul preached the "Unknown God" to the Athenians; touched the massive pillars of Bacchus, and gazed down into the subterranean passage leading from this temple of spirit-rites into the vast amphitheater. What a hollow sound! Do not the dead voice their sorrow here? "Let there be light! said Liberty; And, like sunrise from the sea, Glorious States; and are they now He found the ruins of the temple of Minerva, the temple of the Winds, the temple of the Muses, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, " many of whose proud columns," he writes, "having defied the storms and devastating forces of time, remain as standing signals of architectural splendor and perfection." There, too, were the remains of Hadrian's Arch, the bed of the Ilissus, the monument of Lysicrates, the theater of Bacchus, the temple of Theseus, the magnificent Parthenon, and the shattered arts of Pericles and Phidias, "stripped by Venetian, by Turk, by earthquake, by time, by Lord Elgin for the British Museum, still serene in their indestructible beauty." "Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great! . . . Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume, Leap from Eurostas' banks, and call thee from the tomb?" Reflecting on the causes of that superb intellectual era which Greece exhibited four hundred years before the Christian Era, he queried whether it was not a reflection or partial reflection of the "Silver Age" of prehistoric times. In the mind of the intuitive philosopher, a greater Greece existed in Atlantean times, and this greater Greece is to be reproduced on Grecian soil, dating its incipient rise in the twentieth century! He writes thus: "Under the shadow of an unspiritual church, science was neglected, the oracles abandoned, and Grecian civilization recoiled into brooding silence among these ruins! What is required, then? - Philosophy with phenomena, science with marvel, and reason crowning all. I stood over the prisoncave where the Greeks confined the Spiritualistic Socrates, the iron gate still there,- a gloomy den, to converse with a Crito and an Alcibiades. Judea and Greece awarded to their inspired teachers crosses and hemlock draughts. Such was gratitude! Have the times only in method greatly changed? "It seems strange to walk the streets of Athens, and compare its sparse and degenerate five thousand inhabitants with its enlightened and cultured populace of long ago. There stands the Parthenon, unrivaled still. There are to be found the relics of architecture, poetry, and sculpture, that tell of the transcendent genius of those departed masters. To-day our scholars and our devotees of the fine arts flock to that ancient seat of genius and learning, to borrow the inspiration that seems even yet to sanctify the place. From these testimonies to intellects whose incarnate forms have long since vanished off the earth, we turn and look upon the present living people, and ask ourselves, Is this progress? these degenerate descendants of illustrious ancestors? Progress, triumphant elsewhere, stands aloof from Greece; only retrogression there. From Athens I desired to go back to Marathon and Corinth, but was told that it would be unsafe; for brigandage is rife in that region, and is secretly countenanced by the officials of the country." Boarding the steamer again, he entered the Dardanelles, the ancient Hellespont, and glided close to the crumbled ruins of historic Troy, where blind Homer begged his bread. Up the Hellespont. "There, right there, is the locality," said the captain, "where Byron swam across these waters, May 3, 1810, from Sestos to Abydos; where the young Venetian, Leander, years before him, performed the feat, to secure the hand of his ladylove." Byron records it, "He swam for love, and I for glory." XXIX PILGRIMAGE IN THE ORIENT "Tis the clime of the East; 'tis the land of the sun! Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done?" "Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise." Thomas Paine. Early one October morning, 1869, the steamer on which our brother was embarked, sailed round the Golden Horn, and there was spread out before him the magnificent city of Constantinople, resting upon seven hills, with its domes and minarets lighted up with a golden splendor from the first beams of the morning sun. Here again, he was walking on enchanted ground. No one knows how long a city has stood upon this ancient site. The city took its present name from Constantine the Great, in the fourth century, who thought to make it the capital of his empire and seat of the Christian Church. The Turkish name is Islamboul, while that which preceded Constantine was Byzantium. The history of the city within historic times has been chiefly a record of sieges and heroic attempts to keep out invaders. The present city is superincumbent on a succession of ruins which point to perished cities in the long-forgotten past. Describing the scene in an editorial, he says: "The sun now colors the eastern sky with gold. Rising, it tips and turns the minarets to fire. The buildings, the vessels, the mosques, are all illuminated. "If Geneva has been called the proud, and Naples the beautiful, Constantinople may rightly claim for herself the title of magnificent. Seated in gardens, it is not strange Constantine should have desired to have removed the capital of the Roman Empire to the site occupied by this imperial city. No soul alive to the beautiful in nature, or the exquisite in art, could fail of admiring its lofty and imposing position, its domes, its minarets, its sheltering groves of cypress, its hills in the distance, now crimsoning into the sear of autumn, and the blue waters that lie at the feet of those Moslem splendors. ... The Sea of Marmora is deep and beautiful. . . . What a magnificent harbor it would make, with Constantinople for the central capital of Europe, Asia, and Africa!" The conception of such a capital is grand: the future will tell whether it is prophetic. Surveying the tower at Pera, the flotilla upon the Golden Horn, the Bosporus with its suburban villages, the palaces of the Sultan, the peopled hillsides upon the Asian coast, the hospital scene of Florence Nightingale's womanly work during the Crimean war, he shouted aloud on the deck of the steamer, "What a great cosmopolitan city! my soul thrills with intense delight!" But — "Distance lends enchantment to the view." Landing, the spell vanished. "No omnibuses," he says, "no conveyances of any sort, offered us their accommodations; only sedan-chairs were on hand for the ladies, and hammals for the carrying of trunks. The most obvious feature of this city is its dogs. Constantinople is the dog's paradise. There are two ways in which you can insult a Turk, viz., spit on his beard, or kick a dog; for that animal is sacred: the bark of a dog once saved the city, by betraying the enemy." Of his observations and experiences in Constantinople, this is his statement, reported in The Universe: "The religion of these Moslem millions, little understood and frequently misrepresented, is in one of its theoretical aspects, at least, eminently Unitarian. Their first article of belief declares, that God is great: there is but one God, Allah!' Mohammedanism is not a comparatively new religion. M. de Percival, speaking of its antiquity, says, 'This was not a new religion which Mohammed announced, but the |