These mosques have enormous naves, white, austere, majestic in their simplicity, over which a flood of soft, uniform light pours from numberless windows; every object stands out distinctly from one extremity to the other, and mind and sight seem lulled to sleep by a dreamy sense of utter peacefulness and calm, as though in some misty valley surmounted by a serene white heaven; only the reverberation of your own footsteps recalls the fact that you are in an enclosure. There is nothing to distract the mind; the imagination, spanning directly and without effort the intervening space and light, arrives at once before the object of adoration. There is nothing to suggest either melancholy or terror--no illusions, no mysteries, no shadowy corners in which the symbols of a complicated hierarchy of supernatural beings glimmer vaguely before the confused senses. There is the one clear, distinct, all-compelling idea of a sole and omnipotent God, who demands in his temple the severe nakedness of the sunlit desert, and permits no likeness or image of himself other than the sky. All the imperial mosques of Constantinople possess these common characteristics--a majesty which uplifts and a simplicity which concentrates upon one single object the mind of the worshipper, differing so little from one another, even in the matter of detail, that it is difficult to preserve any distinct recollection of them. The Ahmediyeh has a peculiarly graceful and pleasing exterior, possessing, notwithstanding its great size, the airy lightness of a fabric built of clouds; its dome is supported on enormous white marble piers around which four small mosques could be built, and it is the only one in Stambul which can boast of the glorious girdle of six minarets. The mosque of Suleiman, more like a little sacred city than a single temple, where a stranger might readily lose his way, has three great naves, and its dome, higher than that of St. Sophia,[J] rests upon four marvellous columns of red granite, suggesting the trunks of those gigantic trees in California. The mosque of Muhammad is a white and radiant St. Sophia; that of Bayezid has the pre-eminence for elegance of outline; that of Osman is built entirely of marble; the Shazadeh mosque possesses the two most exquisite minarets in Stambul; that in the Ok Serai quarter is the most charming example of the renaissance of Turkish art. The Selimiyeh is the most severe, the mosque of Mahmûd the most elaborate, the Validéh Sultan the most ornate. Each one has some peculiar beauty of its own, or else a legend or special privilege attached to it. The Ahmediyeh guards the standard of the Prophet; the Bayezidiyeh is crowned by clouds of pigeons; the Suleimaniyeh can boast of inscriptions written by the hand of Kara Hissari; in the mosque of the Validéh Sultan is the imitation gold column which cost the conqueror of Candia his life. Sultan Muhammad sees, “eleven imperial mosques bow their heads around him, even as