The rural population of Servia must necessarily advance slowly, but each five years, for a generation to come, will,--I have little doubt,--alter the aspect of the town population, as much relatively as the five that are by-gone. Let the lines of railway now in progress from Belgium to Hungary be completed, and Belgrade may again become a stage in the high road to the East. A line by the valleys of the Morava and the Maritsa, with its large towns, Philippopoli and Adrianople, is certainly not more chimerical and absurd than many that are now projected. Who can doubt of its _ultimate_ accomplishment, in spite of the alternate precipitancy and prostration of enterprise? Meanwhile imagination loses itself in attempting to picture the altered face of affairs in these secluded regions, when subjected to the operation of a revolution, which posterity will pronounce to be greater than those which made the fifteenth century the morning of the just terminated period of civilization. CHAPTER XXVII. Poetry.--Journalism.--The Fine Arts.--The Lyceum.--Mineralogical cabinet.--Museum.--Servian Education. In the whole range of the Slaavic family there is no nation possessing so extensive a collection of excellent popular poetry. The romantic beauty of the region which they inhabit, the relics of a wild mythology, which, in its general features, has some resemblance to that of Greece and Scandinavia,--the adventurous character of the population, the vicissitudes of guerilla warfare, and a hundred picturesque incidents which are lost to the muses when war is carried on on a large scale by standing armies, are all given in a dialect, which, for musical sweetness, is to other Slavonic tongues what the Italian is to the languages of Western Europe.[21]