It will, then, be better for his sake who writes, as well as his who reads, to describe this famous Seraglio such as it was at the most glorious period of the Ottoman power. Any one who in those old days--say from a lofty tower or one of the minarets of St. Sophia--could take in the entire Seraglio Hill must have enjoyed a sight of extraordinary beauty. Framed by the deep blue of the sea, the Bosphorus, and the harbor, with their semicircle of white sails, arose the great green mass of the hill, girdled by walls and towers and crowned by guns and sentinels. From the centre of this forest of lofty trees, through which innumerable footpaths glistened and flower-beds flaunted their gay colors, rose the vast rectangle of the Seraglio buildings, divided into three large courtyards, or rather little towns, built around three irregular squares, whose roofs showed in a confused, many-colored mass--terraces filled with flowers, gilded cupolas, white minarets, airy pinnacles of kiosks, great arched doorways, alternating with gardens and groves, and half buried in foliage. It was a little white metropolis, glittering, irregular, light as an encampment of tents, through which there breathed a spirit at once voluptuous, pastoral, and warlike. In one part it was all life and movement, in another silent and deserted as a necropolis; here open and bathed in sunlight, there plunged in perpetual gloom and hidden from human gaze. A thousand zephyrs fanned it, while its unending succession of contrasting lights and shadows, its brilliant coloring, and subdued tints of blue and gray were alike reflected in its marble buildings and tiny lakes, above which soared flocks of doves and swallows. Such was the external aspect of the imperial city, not, perhaps, so very large to the eye of one overlooking it from above, but within so divided and subdivided, so intricate and irregular, that servants familiar with its inner courts for upward of fifty years would still grow confused and take the wrong turn, and the Janissaries when they invaded it for the third time again lost their way.