bination of powerful, rich, mellow, and metallic voices of the Chantres de la Cour, places this extraordinary corps of sacred performers above all the rest; they are particularly affecting when executing some of Bortniansky's scores in minor keys :-that rich field of harmony which affords so great a variety of modulations, admirably calculated to express every shade of religious sentiment, and each successive state of our mind, when absorbed in deep and sacred meditation. But the Russians, or rather the imperial family, have another extraordinary and striking species of music which deserves to be mentioned in this place. They call it the hunting, or horn music; but it might with more propriety be styled an organ on a new construction. A band of from twenty to forty performers, equally skilled in blowing a short straight horn, are brought to execute what the keys of an organ are made to perform under the hands of an able master, namely, the simplest as well as the most complicated pieces of music, in all keys, and by every measure of time required; each performer never sounding more than one and the same note as set down for him,-just as each key of an organ always produces the same note. As in that instrument, the most eloquent music is generally the result of such a disposition in its keys; and thus also the horn music of St. Petersburgh produces a most enchanting effect. This band occasionally performs in public, particularly during the summer, at the parties de chasse of the court, and at the time of the public promenades, which take place on the smaller islands at that season. This species of music, which is peculiar to Russia, was invented by a Bohemian named Maresch, a performer at the court of the Empress Elizabeth; and a treatise was published about thirty years ago by Henrichs of St. Petersburgh, with specimens of the manner in which the notes are set down for each performer. CONSTANTINOPLE. CONSTANTINOPLE has been frequently devastated by the bursting of the sea over its bulwark. In 1322, its violence threw down a considerable portion of the city walls; and twelve years afterwards, the adjacent country presented one wide sheet of water for a distance of ten stadia. Under Justinian the Great, it had been previously inundated for a space of fifteen miles. These excesses of nature, if I may be permitted the expression, were generally the effect of earthquakes, of which the history of Constantinople affords so many lamentable instances. One of them, which occasioned the fall of the dome of the great church of St. Sophia, has been the object of a notable piece of religious quackery among the Arabians. In order to impart a miraculous character to Mohammed's birth, they have congregated the demolition of this dome, and 40 ATHENEUM, VOL. 1, 3d series. the overthrow of the royal palace at Bagdad, into the same night in which their prophet came into the world; regardless of the anachronism which would unhinge Chronology, by no less a term than ten years; for, on the datum, Mohammed, whose epocha begins from the period of his flight when fifty-three years of age, (A.D. 622,) must have been born in 569. None of the earthquakes by which this metropolis has been afflicted, were so pregnant with calamity as that of 875, when the whole of Asia, from the Nile to the Bosphorus, was shaken to its centre; the promontory of Laodicea being engulphed in the ocean, and four hundred thousand souls being buried beneath the ruins of cities, towns, and villages. So frequent, indeed, was the occurrence of these frightful visitations in former times, that fires and earthquakes constitute leading articles with the Ottoman writers; and I cannot resist the temptation of translating the following extract from Seadeddin, the historiographer, for the edification of those to whom these outrageous throes of our Mother Earth are less familiar. Our author is describing the tremendous convulsion, which laid Constantinople in ruins during the reign of Bajazet, (A.D. 1511.) * "On the first day of the moon Dscheonasiul ewwel of the aforementioned year, in a night of horror, when the lord of the fourth sphere, the luminary of heaven, irradiated the inhabitants of our globe with his splendors, and the apple of man's eye sunk to repose within the mortal lid; and when the moon was descending from the highest region of heaven towards his ethereal bed, the Creator, who has planted the mountains' lofty peaks as the pillars of the earth, made manifest his power and greatness by sending a mighty earthquake, at whose thunders the world trembled, and the elements were confounded. The night, pregnant with this pestilence, brought forth in her agonies strange and wonderful effects from the lap of non-entity; time and space, hours and circumstances, shook together; the furthest parts of earth quivered with horror, and the human fabrics of Constantinople kissed the dust. Many a dome, which rivalled the cupola of heaven in strength and loftiness, was levelled to the ground; the walls crumbled in almost every direction; towns and ramparts were laid low; even the venerable female, Earth, was convulsed with dismay at this frightful calamity; man turned away his foot from his home, and took up his abode in the open field, with a heart rent in twain at the remembrance of his Prophet's warning, full of horror as it is, 'A little earthquake is a mighty matter."" this city, it has been my fate to experience the tangible effects of two slight shocks. On the first occasion, I was engaged in preparing my despatches, when my desk, inkstand, and the other paraphernalia of my cabinet, were shaken to and fro; on the second, I was strolling one evening through Bujukdere, with a female companion, when our heads were suddenly driven into forcible contact; and each of us was accusing the other of this flagrant breach of gentle observances, as we crossed our own threshold; when both were absolved from the oft-rebutted charge, by the clamor prevailing, in consequence of the tribulation which Mother Earth had just experienced. There is no spot on which the three kingdoms have shed their largesses with so prodigal a hand as on Constantinople. Land and water appear to emulate each other in promoting the enjoyments of its "in-dwellers." With all due deference to the Areopagus of the " Almanac des Gourmands,” I must be permitted, in as far as the animal kingdom is concerned, to speak of the Byzantian kitchen, as claiming preeminence over the Parisian, for its hares and wild boars; and still more cause have I to deprecate their wrath, when I hazard the dictum that the acmé of epicurism centres in the richly delicious quails, which cover both sides of the Bosphorus by thousands in the month of September; and, when sowed up in the sauce produced by their own fat, mixed with the pilav or kneaded rice, constitute a dish of so unequalled a relish, that he that has tasted it will no longer be at sea for the motive which may have inspired the Israelite of old with his notorious longing "for the quails and flesh-pots of Egypt." Yet, I must confess, that even these dainty purveyances sink into the shade, when placed by the side of the marine products, which render the Billingsgate of Constantinople the empress of fishDuring a residence of four years in markets. The Bosphorus swarms with Such is the picture drawn by the estimable author of "The diadem of Ottoman History." The moon. myriads of the finny tribe; and could old Homer "live o'er his song again," he would re-immortalize it as "prolific of fish." The most ordinary of these are the scombri, a species of mackarel, which are dried, without salt, by the Greeks; pulamedes and stavridia, two species of dolphins; and anchovies and nilufer, which latter are caught by torch-light on their migration from the Black into the White Sea, during the autumn, when the Greek women, each provided with boat and torch, pass the whole night upon the water, fascinating the nilufer into their nets by means of its impetuous dash at the treacherous blaze. To the turbot, roatch, and lamprey, you have yet to add that monarch of the table, the sword-fish, which is caught along the shore in wooden cells, on which the fishermen will sit for whole hours in motionless abiding of a solitary victim. Shell-fish also are found in plenty and perfection. The Bosphorus is at times enlivened by the gambols of shoals of dolphins, whose effigies are extant on the ancient Byzantine coins. The plantain and cypress lend an Oriental aspect to the environs of Constantinople. The branches of the latter growing invariably upwards, and "aspiring to the skies," the nations of the East regard it as their tree of liberty; in which character it is found on tombs, as a symbol of the soul, which deposits its mortal trammels in the grave, and thence aspires to a heavenly mansion. The mulberry, the mimora of the Nile, the accacia, diospyros lotos or trebizond palm, pine, and fig-tree, beautifully intermingle, and diversify the enchanting scenery around this metropolis. Nor does it yield to any of the hundred cities I have visited, in the delicate and abundant produce of its orchards and gardens. In fact, Constantinople offers the best of" entertainment for man and beast;" yet the "march of intellect" bids me halt, and pleasure myself awhile in the region of inquiry. This capital owed its first mural defences to Phidalia, the daughter of Barbyses, from whose consort, Bysas, it took its elder name of Byzantium. Its first assailant was Philip of Macedon, who had no sooner effected a breach in its walls than Lev, his opponent, filled them up with tombstones. Pausanius of Sparta is reported to have been its second founder; and it was a third time regenerated by the Emperor Severus, after it had been laid in the dust by a three years' continued succession of earthquakes. But Constantine was the great patron and extender of the Byzantian metropolis, particularly during the twenty-fifth year of his reign, when he completed the magnificent baths of Neptune, transformed the temples of Diana, Hecate, and Venus, into shrines for Christian worship, and placed the pearly diadem of the East on his reforming brow. The walls of Constantinople were repeatedly renewed, either wholly or partially, by that monarch's successors; and their shattered remains were razed to the ground, and a complete circuit of fresh defences erected by Mohammed the Second, who effected the conquest of this capital on the 29th of May, 1453. Having suffered extensive damage by an earthquake in 1635, Amurath the Fourth employed about 18,000 of his soldiery in repairing them, and carried his renovations to an extent of no less than 19,280 ells. After this restoration had been accomplished, he fixed the future amount of the garrison at 12,000 men, and assigned them an annual pay of 200,000 piastres. Since the year 1721, when Achmet III. gave them a thorough restoration, little or no pains have been bestowed in repairing the inroads made upon them by the hand of time, or the convulsions of nature. There they stand, with the inserted shaft, pedestal, frieze, altar, and tombstone, attesting both their antiquity, as well as the despoiling handywork of their barbarous architects. There is no city in the world which enjoys the unenviable distinction of having been so often besieged as Con THOSE Wonders in creation-subjects of a higher astronomy-systems of suns, performing their revolutions about their common centre of gravity, in vastly extended periods of timelost stars, those bodies which, after shining for ages, gradually disappear, and are no longer seen as glittering gems in the diadem of night-new stars, or such as suddenly appear where no stars were before observed, justifying the suspicion, that these latter are new creations which have commenced their measured circling way, till the appointed period arrives for them to be commanded back to the realms of obscurity-the subject of Nebulæ, a still higher step in this wondrous scale of progression, dimly telling us, not merely of the existence of other suns like our own, with each a splendid retinue of planets, of solar stars connected together by mutual gravitation, but of systems of these, vastly separated in space, yet almost infinite in the individual suns that form the group, and these groups perhaps infinite in number, and scattered with boundless profusion over the vast concavity of the heavens, while the whole of each starry system is,probably, revolving about some distant, stupendous, and unspeakably resplendent, glorious centre ;-these carry the mind beyond the movements of this lower sphere, this remote province of the uni verse, to expatiate on the loftier pinnacles of the higher heavens. Nebula may be generally divided into two kinds; one, a combination of innumerable stars, which, from their distance, have the appearance of a faint cloud,- -a distance so remote, as to leave the most powerful mind faltering in endeavoring to acquire an adequate conception of it: the other, probably not so remote, though inconceivably beyond our system of fixed stars, composed of a luminous matter, of the nature and destiny of which but a very faint idea is furnished for conjecture. The most remarkable of this kind is that in the sword-handle of Orion; its irregularity of form suggests a resemblance to the head of a monstrous animal, with two horns of unequal lengths, making a considerable angle with each other, the lower one having an easterly direction; an unequal brilliancy occurs throughout, as though one part was formed of accumulated luminous matter, assuming in some places the appearance of solidity. Those parts which mark the outline of the mouth and eye of the fancied animal may be better described by comparing them to deep indented bays, nearly of a quadrangular figure, well defined, and by its brightness giving an intensity to the darkness of the sky that it surrounds, which, in these openings (probably by contrast), appears of an unusual blackness. The brightest part has by no means a uniform aspect, but exhibits an unevenness not unlike fleecy clouds of a scirrhous or mottled appearance, as if undergoing some change of separation. This bright region in some directions is abruptly terminated, and beyond it is seen a fainter region of nebulosity, while other parts gradually fade into that which is more diluted, till it subsides in the gloom of the neighboring sky. In these regions are several minute stars, one cluster of four, on the bright part, of different colors, arranged in the form of a trapezium; five others in the fainter part of the nebula, in the direction of the southern horn; other stars are scattered in and near the nebula, some of which are surrounded with the same milky luminosi ty. One most striking peculiarity is observed relative to these stars, that the nebulous matter seems to recede from them, so as to leave a dark space between it and their brilliant points, as though the stars were either repelling the nebulous matter or absorbing it. This is particularly the case with those that form the trapezium: a similar appearance may be observed in Sagittarius,-a nebula is broken into three parts, forming dark roads through the luminous matter, leading to a centre in which is situated a beautiful double star. On one of the sides of the dark openings before referred to, in the nebula of Orion, are filaments or fibres of light, which appear as if extending themselves to the opposite side; and on the sides of the head, in the direction of the northern horn, are faint streams of light, not unlike the tails of comets: closely adjoining to this nebula are several smaller. The whole sky for several degrees around this constellation is not free from these appearances; two, close together, one of a spindle, the other of a circular form; in the centre of the latter is a small star: a small nebula, at the entrance of one of the dark openings, appears as if drawing together into a star. This is but an imperfect description of the present appearance of this magnificent phenomenon, as recently seen by Herschel's 20 feet reflecting telescope. There is every reason to believe that it has undergone consideraable changes since it was first observed by Huygens, in 1656. A careful comparison of the descriptions and drawings of various astronomers seems to indicate that the bright part of the nebula once extended over a larger space, and that it is gradually receding towards the stars that form the trapezium: similar changes are suspected in other nebulæ : in some instances smaller ones are formed by the decomposition of larger. These mysterious luminous masses of matter may be termed the laboratories of the universe, in which are contained the principles of future systems of suns, planets, sa |