There were the same hedges of reeds; lanes of cactus, trellices of cane. Before Mirza crossed the Straits, or the Saracens issued from the desert, the Arabs came not to teach, but to learn the culture of flowers, and the irrigation of fields: they came to pluck the fruit, not to plant the seed of the golden tree. So, in like manner, came the Greeks. I want no books to tell me where were the Hesperides. I tried to forget the taste, figure, and perfumes of the orange and lemon, and the trees that bear them, that I might, with the Greeks who first saw these bowers, enjoy the surprise of their dark perpetual green, of the white untiring flowers, of the freshness, ever ready for the thirsty, stinted by no season, and throughout the year lavishing on all the bounty and the fragrance of their golden fruit. I have never seen men so wild and savage; yet they are of a noble nature. The costume of the East is grand, rich, picturesque; but here is the antique. Elsewhere men are dressed, here they are draped. The figures around are statues, not men. This is the most interesting country I have ever been in. I have trodden a new quarter of the globe,--I have beheld a new form of room, a new costume, a new kind of garden, novel and yet most ancient. At a glance you perceive that here you have got to the fountain which falls back to whence it rises. If you had broken through to a people dwelling beneath the Pyramids, you could not have firmer assurance of rest and immutability; yet they are alive and on the surface of the earth, and in sight of that giant of velocity, Europe, which has been bounding from precipice to precipice of years, spanning gulfs of centuries, and counting thousands of revolutions of the sun to arrive only at forgetfulness. These know nothing of Old Time. He cannot, indeed, be denied in private intercourse; but as regards the state and society, his glass has no sand, his scythe no edge, his arm no swing.