Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows – the south and east oriels – are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising.
Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come back upon the mind with irresistible force.
So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici.
Voluptuous bloom and fragrance rare The summer to its rose may bring; Far sweeter to the wooing air The hidden violet of spring. Still, still that lovely ghost appears, Too fair, too pure, to bid depart; No riper love of later years Can steal its beauty from the heart.
Departed suns their trails of splendor drew Across departed summers: whispers came From voices, long ago resolved again Into the primeval Silence, and we twain, Ghosts of our present selves, yet still the same, As in a spectral mirror wandered there.
The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart’s-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet’s journal, writ in fire and tears… Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years.
Although Damascus is considered the oldest city in the world, the date of its foundation going beyond tradition, there are very few relics of antiquity in or near it.
