The strange brilliant light invading the pure brightness of the heavens and paling the stars, revealing every feature of the landscape with startling distinctness, and yet clothing its most familiar forms with an unwonted aspect; the very water, whose cold surface yet mirrors back the all-pervading glow, and, like the hypocrite of passion, feigns the ardour which it cannot feel; the gorgeous colouring and graceful involutions of the lambent flame, as it gradually dies away into the fantastic, cloudlike masses of smoke, which relieve and contrast it; aU these united form a scene on which the gaze will love to linger. Nor do its sterner and more destructive characteristics fail to excite feelings, which, if of a different order, are perhaps deeper and stronger from finding a closer relation and a more intimate affinity with their material cause.
The resistless force, the devouring energy, the insatiable avidity of an element, which in consuming what it embraces exhausts itself — the fire which intensifies beauty only to reduce it to smouldering ashes, — awaken an admiration which, it may be, springs from the consciousness, that, in the fiercer passions of the human heart, exist the counterparts of these, and that in one of its most secret recesses may be latent a spark, which might light a flame as unquenchable in its nature and as fatal in its eifects.
Some feelings of regret were, perhaps, spared to those who gazed with awe and wonder on the burning of the Government buildings at Kertch, from their ignorance of the fact, that, had a little more deliberation been used, they might have been saved. So, however, it was; and it is hardly possible to suppose, that the sanction of the authorities would have been given to this wholesale destruction, had it been known that Kertch would be so long in the occupation of the Allies.
The drawing was taken from the sea, whence the view must, indeed, have been magnificent. The whole length of the quay was covered with public buildings, not one of which escaped the flames. The house behind the clump of trees, burning with such fury, was the governor's; and other edifices of equal importance carry on the eye of the spectator to the extreme distance, the last building visible being a mill belonging to an Englishman named Plating.* The dark outline of Mount Mithridates, surmounted by the cold columns of the Museum and Stamkoffsky's tomb, forms the background of the picture.
* This mill, -wliich was worked by steam, formed an exception to the rule which spared private property; and was destroyed in consequence of its ha\'ing been extensi\ely employed by the Russian authorities in grinding grain.
INTERIOR OF LORD RAGLAN's HEAD-QUARTERS. 93
INTERIOR OF LORD RAGLAN'S HEAD-QUARTERS.
A COUNCIL OF WAR.
Among the many caprices of foi'tune, one, certainly not the least singular, was that which converted a modest farm-house, in an out-of-theway spot, in a comparatively unknown and little-visited country, into a hall of grave debate, in which the fate of empires was discussed and decided, by men on whose deliberations and on whose deeds hung the history of the present, and the future of generations yet unborn. In this very room, perhaps, the Greek master of the homestead, returning from the labours of the farm, sought refreshment of body and repose of mind in the frugal repast shared with those for whom his daily toil provided, and prepared, it may be, by the " neat-handed Phillis," whose labour was one of love. And amidst the many evidences of comfort and decency with which the modern Greek women still love to embellish in housewifely guise the home of their lords, while the spinning-wheel of the thrifty mother went rapidly round, the father may have bidden his boys read to him one of the still-cherished legends of the far-off days, and listened with dreamy pleasure, not unmixed with pride, to the soft tones in which, in a language even now unparalleled for sweetness and power, the story was told of the great deeds of Alexander and the surprising feats of his horse Bucephalus, or of the godlike valour and surpassing strength of the fabled destroyer of the Hydra, the invincible achiever of the Twelve Labours.
Little would this simple family, pursuing the even tenor of a life like this, have deemed that the hour was not far distant, when the rude presence of the invader would drive them from their peaceful home; and that, within the very walls which had often echoed the narrative of the Siege of Troy, the conduct of a siege, inferior to that in duration only, would be determined by the descendants of Western barbarians, coming from lands which were a wilderness when Greece was in its glory.