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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
