The ordinary course of events, the humdrum monotonous tinkling of life’s daily and ever recurring necessities, is wearisome to the soul. There is a longing for variety; the love of the marvelous craves wherewith to slake its thirst, the imagination seeks its food, and the beautiful, in fancy or reality, must sometimes minister its soothing charms. Anything to escape from the physical, cumbersome part of our nature, into the world of romance and visionary exultation. War and its glory, its sudden vicissitudes of victory and defeat, its brilliant arms and thundering voices excite the most thrilling emotions in the bosoms of care-worn mortals. Love, with its gentle wooing, its kind sympathies, and tender ministry, comes to the heart, sick of itself, as the very balm of Gilead. Religion calls the crushed and bleeding spirit to an unseen world, where fancy may luxuriate in realms of ethereal anticipations, anon to become the realities of Faith, as the soul is discharged from its mortal tenement.

It is, under any guise, a blissful attribute, this ability to soar out of life’s dullness, into scenes of imaginary hope and brightness: to escape from the real into the unreal, whether to deeds of heroic valor, whose charm consists in the extravagance of the excitement, or to linger in the enchantments of a tender passion, or to listen to the tales of others’ woes or joys: all these kindle up the enthusiasm of the soul. But is there ever any reality to what may be termed romance?

If, as some would fain have us believe, the very objects which seem so tangible to our senses, are no realities, what then of the vagaries of the imagination? The moment you reduce the most thrilling incident to mere matter of fact, or divest it of the garb in which fancy ever delights to clothe its objects, the romance loses its charm. The more remote the scene, the more unfettered by conventionalities the actors, the more bewitching the tale of their adventures, and the more impossible the achievements, the better prized. Even the aid of genii and fairies wonderfully helps on this love of the marvelous. What was Aladdin’s lamp more than any other old piece of copper ore, until the slave of the lamp suddenly appeared. There has ever hung over the East, a veil of mystery; it may be from the warmth of the Oriental imagination and its own extravagant creations, or from the seclusiveness of the women, who, as they became unfamiliar objects, seemed to be the very Venuses and Peris of the world of fable. The reserve of the men themselves, leaving their better halves to an obliviousness from all the world, is calculated to excite the curiosity of the community at home, and the rest of the world abroad, and to invest the fair sex with most improbable charms. The difficulty and imminent danger of a single interview, excites the love of adventure. Tottering old crones, themselves the genuine antidotes to all passion, point with their bony fingers to the penetralia, where a goddess in human form enshrines her charms. Even a transformation takes place, a new complexion is produced, feminine draperies and a basket of wares, and you pass the unsuspecting and smooth-faced guardian of the portal. You love to linger in the sweetly perfumed halls, to toy with the beautiful Circassian, as she listlessly lounges on her silken couch; you love even the sense of danger, as you start at every step, and again relax into forgetfulness of the external world. But sometimes there is a sequel; you fly for life; your lovely companion bares her neck to the bow-string, her beautiful form enters the mystic veil of the lost woman; the coarse and heavy sack, her coffin—her grave the blue and briny wave of the ocean stream.

All this is wild, romantic, thrilling, and tragic. But how rare the occurrence; and of the multitude of adventure-loving, romance-seeking beings that people earth’s surface, to whose lot shall we assign the realization? All dream; but how few wake to the vision in life’s action. All fancy; but when does not the broad sunshine of earth’s glare dispel the wreathed and mistlike draperies of imagination. The ideal has an existence only in the “mind’s eye.”

There is, then, no more romance in the East than elsewhere; indeed there is even more of natural life divested of all extravagance of fiction. The very lack of education, which, in some respects, is certainly to be lamented, tends to fasten their hearts together, in the bonds of nature’s best affections. Home has joys enough for their simple souls; so entirely devoid of that refined selfishness, which in other lands seems to annihilate those sweet provisions for kindred sympathies, which arise from the reciprocal affinities of parent and child, brother and sister. There is little food then for morbid imaginations, but much for natural pleasures and simple tastes. The very externals of Orientalism are making their exit from the world’s scene; soon there will not exist even the illusion of characteristic and graceful forms. Ere long we shall realize, that, divested of form and coloring, of tinsel and decoration, the descendants of the great common ancestor of the human race, are all alike in feature, nature, and spirit.

Indeed a general acquaintance with the different tribes and nations under heaven only serves to convince the cosmogonist, that all are of one family, have a common nature or origin, are but human, and liable to human frailties and passions. The most powerful emotions are felt in the bosoms of the savage and the polite. Ambition, love, hatred, revenge, and a like train of absorbing impulses, rule and sway wherever man has planted his footsteps. But how interesting to mark the influence of circumstances, to define the latitudes and longitudes of ideas and actions, to measure the rise and fall of the thermometer of life, according to the various climes on earth’s broad surface, to feel the pulse of the dissenting creeds and dogmas, in a word, to observe the same faculties under such varied culture.

In comparing the different grades of education and civilization, it is curious to observe how often an innate refinement of feeling equals, if not supersedes, the greatest efforts of cultivation, or the brightest results of philosophy. A lifetime spent in the schools often leaves the man far behind one, whose early years have passed in shrewd observation, and practical experience, for while the one is reasoning, abstracting, ruminating, the other experiments, and lo! he enters the very penetralia of the temple of wisdom. And where do we find the most susceptible hearts, the most poetical fancies, the purest aspirations of nature? Not among the dry and tutored reasoners of civilization, but where the mind of man has been untrammeled by rules and etiquettes, forms and ceremonies.