moss, are prostrate among sunken tombs and ruined monuments.
Your spirit is oppressed, your eye is blinded, by that mocking light!
Here and there, upon the borders of the forest, a latticed pavilion of the brightest green, contrasting strangely with the cold, white, spectral-looking head-stones which it overtops, causes you to turn aside almost in wonder; but death is even there—it is the tomb of some beloved child, and the slab within is strown with flowers—flowers that have been gathered in anguish, and moistened with tears. Alas! for the breaking heart and the trembling hand that strewed them there!
I remember nothing more beautiful than the aspect of the burying-ground of Scutari, from the road which winds in front of the summer palace of the Princess Haybètoullah. The crest of the hill is one dense mass of dark foliage, while the slope is only partially clothed with trees, that advance and recede in the most graceful curves; and the contrast between the deep dusky green of the cypresses, and the soft bright tint of the young fresh grass in the open spaces between them, produces an effect almost magical, and which strikes you as being more the result of art than accident, until you convince yourself, by looking around you, that it is to its extent alone that this noble cemetery owes its gloom, for its site is eminently picturesque and beautiful. On one side, an open plain separates it from the channel; on the other, it is bounded by a height clothed with vines and almond trees—the houses of Scutari touch upon its border, and even mingle with its graves in the rear, while before it spreads a wide extent of cultivated land dotted with habitations.
Need I add that the Nekropolis of Scutari, such as I have described it, has also its local superstition? Surely not; and the idea is so wild, and withal so imaginative, that I cannot pass it by without record.
Along the channel may be constantly seen clouds of aquatic birds of dusky plumage, speeding their rapid flight from the Euxine to the Propontis, or bending their restless course from thence back again to the Black Sea, never pausing for a moment to rest their weary wing on the fair green spots of earth that woo them on every side; and it is only when a storm takes place in the Sea of Marmora, or sweeps over the bosom of the Bosphorus, that they fly shrieking to the cypress forest of Scutari for shelter; and these the Turks believe to be the souls of the damned, who have found sepulchre beneath its boughs, and which are permitted, during a period of elementary commotion, to revisit the spot where their mortal bodies moulder; and there mourn together over the crimes and judgment of their misspent existence upon earth—while, during the gentler seasons, they are compelled to pass incessantly within sight of the localities they loved in life, without the privilege of pausing even for one instant in the charmed flight to which they are condemned for all eternity!
My mind was full of this legend when I visited the cemetery—and I can offer no better apology for the wild verses that I strung together as I sat upon a fallen column in one of the gloomiest nooks of the forest, and amid the noon-day twilight of the thick branches, while my companions wandered away among the graves.
THE DAMNÈD SOULS.
Hark! ’tis a night when the storm-god rides
In triumph o’er the deep;
And the howling voice of the tempest chides
The spirits that fain would sleep:
When the clouds, like a sable-bannered host,
Crowd the dense and lurid sky;
And the ship and her crew are in darkness lost
As the blast roars rushing by.
Voices are heard which summon men
To a dark and nameless doom;
And spirits, beyond a mortal’s ken,
Are wandering through the gloom;
While the thunders leap from steep to steep,
And the yellow lightnings flash,
And the rocks reply to the riot on high,
As the wild waves o’er them dash.
And we are here, in this night of fear,
Urged by a potent spell,
Haunting the glade where our bones are laid,
Our tale of crime to tell—
We have hither come, through the midnight gloom,
As the tempest about us rolls,
To spread mid the graves, where the rank grass waves,
The feast of the Damnèd Souls.
Some have flown from the deep sea-caves
Which the storm-won treasures hold;
And these are they who through life were slaves
To the sordid love of gold;
No other light e’er meets their sight,
Save the gleam of the yellow ore;
And loathe they there, in their dark despair,
What they idolized before.
They have swept o’er the rude and rushing tide,
Bestrewn with wreck and spoil,
Where the shrieking seaman writhed and died
’Mid his unavailing toil;
And they rode the wave, without power to save
The wretch as he floated by;
And sighed to think, as they saw him sink,
What a boon it was to die!
Some were cast from the burning womb,
Whence the lava-floods have birth;
From fires which wither, but ne’er consume
The rejected one of earth—
And these are they who were once the prey
Of the thirst that madmen know,
When the world for them is the diadem
That burns into the brow.
They who crouch in the deepest gloom
Where no lightning-flash can dart,
Who, chained in couples, have hither come,
And can never be rent apart;
These are they whose life was a scene of strife,
And who learnt, alas! too late,
That the years flew fast which they each had cast
On the altar of their hate.
But, hark! through the forest there sweeps a wail
More wild than the tempest-blast,
As each commences the darkling tale
Of the stern and shadowy past—
And the spell that has power, in this dread hour,
No pang of our’s controls—
Nor may mortal dare in the watch to share
That is kept by the Damnèd Souls!
CHAPTER X.
Character of the Constantinopolitan Greeks—The Greek Colony at the Fanar—Vogoride, Logotheti, and Angiolopolo—Political Sentiment—Chateaubriand at the Duke de Rovigo’s—Biting Criticism—Greek Chambers—“What’s in a Name?”—Custom of Burning Perfumes—The Pastille of the Seraglio—Turkish Cosmetics—Eastern Beauty.
The more I saw of the Greeks, the more curious did I find the