But the narrowest part of the channel is found to the northward of the old Turkish castles between the cities of Sestos and Abydos.

It was here that the adventurous Leander braved the passage of the flood for the possession of his mistress.

It was here, likewise, in a place where the distance between the opposite banks cannot exceed five hundred paces, that Xerxes imposed a stupendous bridge of boats for the purpose of transporting into Europe an hundred and seventy myriads of barbarians.

A sea contracted within such narrow limits may seem but ill to deserve the singular epithet of _broad_, which Homer, as well as Orpheus, has frequently bestowed on the Hellespont.

But our ideas of greatness are of a relative nature; the traveller, and especially the poet, who sailed along the Hellespont, who pursued the windings of the stream and contemplated the rural scenery which appeared on every side to terminate the prospect, insensibly lost the remembrance of the sea, and his fancy painted those celebrated straits with all the attributes of a mighty river flowing with a swift current in the midst of a woody and inland country, and at length through a wide mouth discharging itself into the AEgean or Archipelago.