I feel now as though the scratching of my pen were sacrilege, just as I first tread softly on this sacred soil and would start when I heard some one laugh aloud. I cannot tell you of the deep impression Athens has made upon me.
If you were here where I could touch your hand and, without one word being spoken, we could stand and drink in all its grandeur, or sit in silence by moonlight watching the shadows come and go, you would understand—but to put Athens in cold black and white, ah, never ask me to try.
The new Athens, like Florence, is broad and white, but not glistening. The old Athens—my Athens—lies yonder on the hill, a mass of monstrous rocks, gigantic pillars and huge squares of stone which some mighty tempest or some avalanche seems to have scattered hither and yon.
It was by the light of the moon that the vastness of the Acropolis impressed itself upon me, though the immensity of purpose—the Herculean obstacles surmounted—rather than its ponderous proportions, creates its magnitude. But it was just as the day was dawning that its loveliness appeared to me.
I have been to the Acropolis with a registered cicerone who knew every stone of it, and again with a fine young Greek who loved every atom of it, but today at dawn I stood there alone and watched the sun come up seemingly from beneath my feet. No sound broke the stillness. All nature was hushed that I might bid my beloved Athens farewell. There she lay outspread before me, bathed in the first faint glow of the early dawn. Far down is the Porte Beulé and the marble staircase from it to the Propylæa, one of whose courts leads to that diminutive jewel, the Temple of Nike, with its Pentelic marble grown yellow with age.
THE ACROPOLIS AS IT WAS
THE ACROPOLIS AS IT IS
THE TEMPLE OF THESEUS IN FOREGROUND
Before the sun had climbed above the mountain, I watched the purple marble of the Erechtheion turn to gold, giving a rosy glow of youth to the Maidens of the Caryatides portico who have held up their canopy for two thousand years. Always before the eye, tall and commanding, in all its perfection, stands the Parthenon. Off yonder is Mars Hill, and far beyond, the Temple of Theseus, its weather-stained, golden-hued marbles, that have braved the storms of centuries, exhaling a vigorous vitality.