XIX. JAPAN. The Rev. William Elliott Griffis has written two good books on Japan, "The Mikado's Empire," and a smaller volume, "Japan in History, Folk-Lore, and Art." (Riverside Young People's series, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1892.) Basil Hall Chamberlain's Things Japanese" is a useful reference book. Morris's "Advance Japan" is a recent work. The Johns Hopkins University has published some valuable constitutional studies of Japan by native Japanese. Common interest of Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States. IN AREADING MINI JOURNEYin MN the NINI Summary of Pre- [The voyage from New York to Gibraltar, scenes in Tangier and Algiers, and the arrival ceding Chapters. at Alexandria were described in the October issue. In November, Alexandria, the trip to Upper Egypt, and scenes along the Nile were the subjects considered. In December, "Down the Nile to Cairo was the topic. "Modern Palestine and Syria - from Port Said to Beirut" constituted the region visited in January. In February Asia Minor was visited. "Constantinople" was the subject in March.] Mapping the HERA'S TEMPLE AT VII. A CRUISE IN THE EGEAN. BY J. IRVING MANATT. (Professor of Greek in Brown University.) EAVEN and History have joined hands to make this the bluest Hand bravest of seas. Lord Byron was not the first (as has been ୩ claimed) to note "the extraordinary intensity of the deep blue color" of the Egean, for the Homeric poet had caught every glancing tint of it, and eternalized them in such epithets as twinkling, skyey, violet-hued, wine-colored, purple, grey, dark, and black (compare Tozer's "Geography of Greece," p. 61 ff.). And for story it holds all the fame of the Golden Fleece and Helen of Troy; it saw Hellenic brain and brawn wreck the Persian armada at Salamis and Constantine Kanares fire the Ottoman flag-ship at Chios. It is no easy task to map this storied sea-confined on the north by the comparatively regular Thracian coastline, until that line takes on its more Hellenic character, and thrusts its own trident of islands important enough to be designated on a map-scale of eighty miles to the inch. Yet these numbers give no adequate impression of the actual density; for, whereas the northern Ægean is comparatively open sea, three-fourths of the Ægean islands are crowded into a little square which forms but one-fourth of the area marked out above. Of this smaller island-world, the ideal center is an islet too tiny to be Holy Delos. named on any map in Freeman's "Historical Geography of Europe," although it was once the focus of European history; and the yachtsman, who makes his own schedules and carries his own stores, should begin and end his Ægean cruise at Holy Delos. Yet I bethink me that the gentle reader (or the patient pilgrim) is this moment taking his last look at St. Sophia, and I must meet him in that neighborhood. Not that we shall linger for a moment on scenes already limned by a master hand; but, once out of the Hellespont, the field is ours. To our right stretches Thraceward a chain of islands at which we must Imbros. glance, lying out of our course though they are. The nearest, Imbros, with "its winding shores and rolling hills," is a fair picture to look upon, but has little else to detain us. But beyond and above it looms the watch-tower whence Poseidon overlooked the toil and moil of Troy; it is Samothrace, the highest peak in the Ægean this side of Crete, and Samothrace. it commands at once Thessalian Olympus and the Plain of Troy, thus enabling the blue-haired earth-shaker to keep an eye on wrangling gods as well as warring men. And it is in these waters that lave the shores of Samothrace and rocky Imbros that Thetis had her deep-sea dwelling; and, when Achilles utters that heart-broken cry over his comrade slain, it is here "his lady mother heard him as she sat in the depths of the sea beside her aged sire," and with that train of Nereids of the beautiful names she speeds to mingle her divine tears with his, and then to fetch the marvelous armor from Hephæstus's forge. Samothrace was the holy The holy place of place of the Great Gods, with more pilgrims thronging to their mysteries the Great Gods. than any other island shrine but Delos could count. St. Paul found the cult still flourishing there, and in recent years (1875) the foundations of the great sanctuary have been laid bare. Last in this little chain lies Herodotus Thasos close under Thrace," the most beautiful island in the Ægean" (as Thasos. Heading south, we have on our larboard close inshore little Tenedos, dear to Sminthian Apollo and yet raided by Achilles; while far out to sea lies hazy Lemnos-first station of that old transmarine telegraph by which Agamemnon "Beacon to beacon fast and forward flashed" from Ida to Arachne and the weary watch on his own palace roof with tidings of fallen Troy. Lemnos has a yet elder fame; for its rude-spoken Sintian men received Hephæstus kindly when that unlucky peacemaker hurled headlong from the heavenly threshold by his testy sire-landed there. In other words, it was a volcanic isle, and, indeed, the typical one to the old Greek poets, though no extinct volcano or other evidence of volcanic agency, is now to be found upon it-doubtless because its fire-mountain (Mosychlos) was swallowed by the sea, as Pausanias tells us, before his time. If these islands in the North Ægean demand but passing notice, there are three in our southward course lying close inshore, on which we may well linger. These are Lesbos, Chios, and Samos. For varied and perennial interest, in landscape, literature, and history, they were hard to match even in this storied and shining sea. Lesbos, between Lemnos and Chios, "Where burning Sappho loved and sung," is forever the land of the lyre and of love. Even in Homer the Lesbian ladies are a parable of female beauty; on Lesbos, Longus lays the scene of his "Daphnis and Chloe"; and in our day the poet Bernardakes divides his time between his Lesbian vineyards and the Muses. Arion (if ever he was) hailed from Lesbos. So did that swashbuckler bard Alcæus, who wooed the Poetess too rudely, and whose brother fought under Nebuchadnezzar at Carchemish in 605 B. C., if we can take Otfried Müller's word for it. Another Lesbian of the same age Time has vindicated-Pittacus survives the flings of Alcæus, and may fairly be reckoned among the good rulers as well as the Seven Sages of old Greece. And if you go ashore at Mitylene, you may lodge at a hostelry which still keeps his memory green, the Xenodocheion Pittakos. One cannot think of Lesbos without recalling two of the darkest Lesbos. passages in Athenian history; the barely averted massacre of Mitylene in the fourth year of the Peloponnesian war (427 B. C.), and the consummated judicial murder of the Athenian generals who won the brilliant victory at the Arginusæ islets here some twenty years later. Thus far we have kept pretty well in the wake of the Return from Chios. Troy, but now we must settle for ourselves the question which Nestor and Menelaus debated here at Lesbos - whether to go seaward of craggy Chios, keeping the isle upon the left, or inside Chios, past windy Mimas. By Poseidon's bidding they steered a straight course for Euboea; but the channel route appeals to us. For on that course we pass close under the "School of Homer," or the leveled rock platform which goes by that name. Archæologically Ithaca's "School of Homer" makes a better showing, but sentimentally it is here we would look for the "blind old bard of Scio's rocky isle." It is on this side, also, that we find the modern town with its Genoese castle, to remind us of the fact that for two hundred years and more (1346-1566) Chios was the property and under the government of a joint-stock company,-Genoese merchants anticipating here in a small way what the East India Company was to do later on an imperial scale. Farther down the channel and at its narrowest point, we look upon the spot where Constantine Kanares fired the Turkish flag-ship in 1822. It was a heroic act of retaliation on the monsters who had just wreaked upon Chios barbarities before which even Cleon's bloody designs against Mitylene appear merciful. The opening of the Greek revolution found this island the garden of The butchery of the Ægean; it had drawn to itself all that was refined, intelligent, and Chios. |