The Ottoman convert - E. Williams Author:Edward Williams Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. Nothing can exceed the beauty of the approach to Constantinople by sea. The seven-hilled city, with her diadem of mosques and minarets, looking do... more »wn upon the " Golden Horn " (for so was her harbour called by the ancients, from the wealth of nations which flowed into it), forms one of the most magnificent landscapes in the world. The classic scholar, as his eye glances from the shores of Europe to those of Asia, which a strait no wider than a mighty river here divides, recalls the times of fabulous antiquity, when the winged oracle flew with the measuring line from " the City of Blind Men," the .ancient Chalcedon, to the nobler site of Byzantium opposite. The Christian scholar combines in his ideas the legends of antiquity with the dawn of Christian light, and looks with tender interest on the city which was once the Queen of Nations, in the noblest sense, — not only the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, but the first city placed by Imperial mandate under the banner of theCross. He anticipates with holy eagerness the time when those mosques shall again become Christian temples, and remarks, with present pleasure, that there are no idols in them to pull down, no Pagan altars to remove. They are spacious, simple, and unincumbered with outward symbols of ceremonial, as his own pure faith. The British subject (if he be patriotic), as he catches sight of the Prince's Islands, the shores of Scutari, and the crest of cypresses on the heights of Pera, is led further still in mournful, and tender, and prophetic meditation. He remembers that his country has bled for that land, that the graves of her soldiers skirt the margin of its silver sea. Should he not also pray that, like the blood of the martyrs, it may prove, in future times, to have been the fruitful seed of the Ch...« less