Sometimes an hour of Fate’s serenest weather Strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams; Somewhere above us, in elusive ether, Waits the fulfilment of our dearest dreams.
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.
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.
It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one’s own.
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.
Who thinks, at night, that morn will ever be? Who knows, far out upon the central sea, That anywhere is land? And yet, a shore Has set behind us, and will rise before: A past foretells a future.
