pitied because they have no idea that they need pity, generally
betake themselves to the cemeteries, where, seated under the olive
trees, they spend the day in doing nothing."

The ease, grace, and dramatic power of this description no reader will
question.

After visiting most shrines of interest in the Holy Land, Miss Bremer
extended her tour to the Turkish sea-coast, and investigated all that
was worth seeing at Beyrout, Tripoli, Latakia, Rhodes, Smyrna, and
Constantinople. In bidding farewell to the East, she expressed her joy
and delight at having seen it, but added that not all its gold, nor all
its treasure, would induce her to spend her days in its indolent and
luxurious atmosphere. She loved the West, with its intellectual activity
and deep moral life, its progress and its aspirations after the higher
liberty. The inertia of the East irritates a strong brain almost to
madness.

Her next pilgrimage was to classic Greece, the land of Solon and
Lycurgus, Pericles and Pisistratus, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and
Demosthenes--the land of Byron and Shelley--the land of poetry and
patriotism, of the myths of gods and the histories of heroes--the land
which Art and Nature have fondly combined to enrich with their choicest
treasures. The impression it made upon her was profound. Writing at
Athens, she says:--

"I confess that the effect produced upon me here by life and the
surrounding objects makes me almost dread to remain for any length of
time; dread, lest beneath this clear Olympian heaven, and amid all the
delightful entertainment offered to the senses, it might be possible,
not, indeed, to forget, but to feel much less forcibly the great aim and
purpose of that life for which the God-Man lived, died, and rose again
from the dead. 'They who cannot bear strong wines should not make use of
them.' For this reason, therefore, I shall soon leave Greece, and return
to my Northern home, the cloudy skies and long winters of which will not
delude me into finding an earthly existence too bewitchingly beautiful.
Yet am I glad that I shall be able to say to the men and women in the
far North, 'If there be any one among you who suffers both in body and
soul from the bleak cold of the North, or from the heavy burden of its
life, let him come hither. Not to Italy, where prevails too much
sirocco, and the rain, when it once begins, rains as if it would never
leave off; no, but hither, where the air is pure as the atmosph