The Sultan and His PeopleOscanyan, C. (Christopher)
History
The Sultan and His People
Oscanyan, C. (Christopher)
Turkey -- Description and travel; Turkey -- Social life and customs
All this is wild, romantic, thrilling, and tragic. But how rare the
occurrence; and of the multitude of adventure-loving, romance-seeking
beings that people earth's surface, to whose lot shall we assign
the realization? All dream; but how few wake to the vision in life's
action. All fancy; but when does not the broad sunshine of earth's
glare dispel the wreathed and mistlike draperies of imagination. The
ideal has an existence only in the "mind's eye."
There is, then, no more romance in the East than elsewhere; indeed
there is even more of natural life divested of all extravagance
of fiction. The very lack of education, which, in some respects,
is certainly to be lamented, tends to fasten their hearts together,
in the bonds of nature's best affections. Home has joys enough for
their simple souls; so entirely devoid of that refined selfishness,
which in other lands seems to annihilate those sweet provisions
for kindred sympathies, which arise from the reciprocal affinities
of parent and child, brother and sister. There is little food then
for morbid imaginations, but much for natural pleasures and simple
tastes. The very externals of Orientalism are making their exit
from the world's scene; soon there will not exist even the illusion
of characteristic and graceful forms. Ere long we shall realize,
that, divested of form and coloring, of tinsel and decoration, the
descendants of the great common ancestor of the human race, are all
alike in feature, nature, and spirit.
Indeed a general acquaintance with the different tribes and nations
under heaven only serves to convince the cosmogonist, that all are
of one family, have a common nature or origin, are but human, and
liable to human frailties and passions. The most powerful emotions
are felt in the bosoms of the savage and the polite. Ambition, love,
hatred, revenge, and a like train of absorbing impulses, rule and sway
wherever man has planted his footsteps. But how interesting to mark
the influence of circumstances, to define the latitudes and longitudes
of ideas and actions, to measure the rise and fall of the thermometer
of life, according to the various climes on earth's broad surface,
to feel the pulse of the dissenting creeds and dogmas, in a word,
to observe the same faculties under such varied culture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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