BAYARD TAYLOR

Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come back upon the mind with irresistible force.

True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics.

So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici.

I know of nothing more moving, indeed semi-tragic, than the yearning helplessness in the face of a dog, who understands what is said to him, and can not answer!

An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered.

I envy those old Greek bathers, into whose hands were delivered Pericles, and Alcibiades, and the perfect models of Phidias. They had daily before their eyes the highest types of Beauty which the world has ever produced; for of all things that are beautiful, the human body is the crown.

I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it. Since being here, I have read the accounts of several travellers, and in many cases the devotional rhapsodies - the ecstacies of awe and reverence - in which they indulge, strike me as forced and affected.

Oh! what waves of crime and bloodshed have swept like the waves of a deluge down the valley of the Rhine! War has laid his mailed hand on those desolate towers and ruthlessly torn down what time has spared, yet he could not mar the beauty of the shore, nor could Time himself hurl down the mountains that guard it.

So far as regards their moral character, the Finns have as little cause for reproach as any other people.

I study hard at Russian, which is a tough but most attractive language.

I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.

The more I see of the Swedes, the more I am convinced that there is no kinder, simpler, and honester people in the world.

The history of Germany is not the history of a nation, but of a race. It has little unity, therefore; it is complicated, broken, and attached on all sides to the histories of other countries.

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.

The view of the Rocky Mountains from the Divide near Kiowa Creek is considered one of the finest in Colorado.

The native Jewish families in Jerusalem, as well as those in other parts of Palestine, present a marked difference to the Jews of Europe and America. They possess the same physical characteristics - the dark, oblong eye, the prominent nose, the strongly-marked cheek and jaw - but in the latter, these traits have become harsh and coarse.

As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me.

Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows - the south and east oriels - are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising.

The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word 'Arya,' meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history.

I came to Berlin not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters... but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world's greatest living man - Alexander von Humboldt.

The bravest are the most tender; the loving are the daring.

The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give; when to this truth you waken then you begin to live.

There is a degree of confidence exhibited towards strangers in Sweden, especially in hotels, at post-stations, and on board the inland steamers, which tells well for the general honesty of the people.