Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/65

 among the fields and woods. Here the orange, the pomegranate, the fig-tree, the olive, the palm, and the cypress intermingled their foliage; and it would, perhaps, be necessary to have imbibed something of the tastes of a naturalist to conceive the pleasure with which our traveller, to whom most of them were new, beheld them put forth their blossoms, or otherwise manifest their being under the influence of spring. One of the greatest ornaments of the gardens in the environs of Smyrna, which are enclosed by hedges of willows planted along the brink of a ditch, is a species of ivy, which, when it finds a proper support, bends round into arches, or hangs from tree to tree in festoons, in so rich and beautiful a manner, that Hasselquist, who seems to have had a high notion of royalty, thought it ought to have adorned the garden of a king. Nature, however, is no respecter of persons. Kings or no kings, Turks, Jews, and gentiles are all one to her. In fact, if we may judge of her political opinions by facts, Nature abhors the foppery and rhodomontade of courts, since, when she has any magnificent or sublime spectacle to exhibit to mankind, she retires to scenes where palaces would be exceedingly out of place, and piles her eternal snows, or pours down her cataracts, or puts her terrible sand-columns in motion in barrenness and solitude.

The spring once begun, every day disclosed some new beauty to the naturalist. Wherever he turned his eyes, thickets of almond trees covered with snow-white blossoms, or fields over which anemones and tulips were sprinkled thick as daisies or buttercups in an English meadow, met the view. The anemone, in particular, was everywhere abundant, in all its varieties of purple, deep-red, and scarlet, with a ring of white round the base of its leaves. One of Hasselquist's favourite walks of this season was the vast Turkish cemetery in the neighbourhood of Smyrna. Here, amid cypresses and a profusion