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.