I would give my memories of the most beautiful view in Constantinople if in exchange I could transfer to my readers any of the profound and singular impressions made upon me by my slow progress between those two interminable chains of ruins and sepulchres, beneath that eastern sun, amid that profound solitude, that utter peacefulness. Often, at some troubled period of my life, I had wished that I might find myself one of a great silent caravan of mysterious persons ever travelling through strange, unfamiliar lands to an unknown goal. Well, that road seemed to answer to this fanciful longing. I wanted it to continue for ever. Far from oppressing me with any feeling of melancholy, I was conscious of a sensation of exhilaration and excitement: the brilliant vegetation, the cyclopean dimensions of the walls, the great rolling surface of the earth like the waves of a mighty ocean, the crowding memories of emperors and armies, of fierce warfare, dead and gone generations, whole nations who had passed away, the great city so near at hand, the mortal stillness, broken only by the beat of an eagle’s wings taking its solitary flight from the summit of a ruined tower,--all flooded my soul, and bore me out of myself on a rushing tide of unutterable desires and longings, which my mortal body seemed too small to contain. I felt as though I ought to be two feet taller, clad in that colossal armor of the grand elector of Saxony which hangs in the Madrid armory, that my tread should resound through the stillness like the measured beat of a troop of mediæval halberdiers, and my arms be endued with titanic strength, that I might lift and heave into place the overturned masses of those superb walls; and, walking thus, with head aloft, with bent brows and clenched hands apostrophizing in heroic verse Constantine and Muhammad, rapt in a sort of warlike delirium, my whole soul in the past, and the blood coursing through my veins with all the heat and fire of first youth, I felt so unutterably happy at being alone, so jealous of that solitude surcharged with life, that, had I suddenly encountered the best friend I have in the world, I am afraid the coolness of my welcome would have estranged him for ever.