Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847

to the end of the article. Table of contents has been created for the HTML version. The index for Volume 61 is included at the end of this issue. CONTENTS. NORTH AMERICA, SIBERIA, AND RUSSIA. LETTERS ON THE TRUTHS CONTAINED IN POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. THE HYMN OF KING OLAF THE SAINT. FOUR SONNETS BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE DECLINING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. HORÆ CATULLIANÆ. PROSPER MÉRIMÉE. HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE AND LIVE IN IT. A TURKISH WATERING-PLACE. PACIFIC ROVINGS. ON THE NUTRITIVE QUALITIES OF THE BREAD NOW IN USE. INDEX TO VOL. LXI. NORTH AMERICA, SIBERIA, AND RUSSIA. [A] The circumnavigation of the world is now a matter of ordinary occurrence to our bold mariners: and after a few years it will be a sort of summer excursion to our steamers. We shall have the requisitions of the Travellers' Club more stringent as the sphere of action grows wider; and no man will be eligible who has not paid a visit to Pekin, or sunned himself in Siam. But a circuit of the globe on terra firma is, we believe, new. Sir George Simpson will have no competitor, that we have ever heard, to claim from him the honour of having first galloped right a-head—from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Pacific to the British Channel. One or two slight divergencies of some thousand miles down the smooth and sunny bosom of the Pacific, are to be reckoned as mere episodes: but Sir George soon recovers his course, plunges in through the regions of the polar star; defies time, trouble, and Tartary; marches in the track of tribes, of which all but the names have expired; follows the glories of conquerors, whose bones have mingled five hundred years ago with the dust of the desert; gives a flying glance on one side towards the Wall of China, and on the other towards the Arctic Circle; still presses on, till he reaches the confines of the frozen civilisation of the Russian empire; and sweeps along, among bowing governors and prostrate serfs,—still but emerging from barbarism—until he does homage to the pomp of the Russian court, and finally lands in the soil of freedom, funds, and the income tax. What the actual object of all this gyration may have been, is not revealed, nor, probably, revealable by a "Governor of the Hudson's Bay