Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

I turned after we had taken leave, and made an apology to speak to her again; for in the interest of the general impression she had made upon me, I had forgotten to notice her dress, and I was not sure that I could remember a single feature of her face. We had called unexpectedly of course, and her dress was very plain. A red cloth cap bound about the temples, with a coloured shawl, whose folds were mingled with large braids of dark-brown hair, and decked with a tassel of blue silk, which fell to her left shoulder, formed her head-dress. In other respects she was dressed like a European. She is a little above the middle height, slightly and well-formed, and walks weakly, like most Greek women, as if her feet were too small for her weight. Her skin is dark and clear, and she has a colour in her cheek and lips that looks to me consumptive. Her teeth are white and regular, her face oval, and her forehead and nose form the straight line of the Grecian model—one of the few instances I have ever seen of it. Her eyes are large, and of a soft, liquid hazel, and this is her chief beauty. There is that “looking out of the soul through them,” which Byron always described as constituting the loveliness that most moved him. I made up my mind, as we walked away, that she would be a lovely woman anywhere. Her horrid name, and the unprepossessing circumstances in which we found her, had uncharmed, I thought, all poetical delusion that would naturally surround her as the “Maid of Athens.” We met her as simple Mrs. Black, whose Scotch husband’s terrier had worried us at the door, and we left her, feeling that the poetry which she had called forth from the heart of Byron, was her due by every law of loveliness.

From the house of the maid of Athens we walked to the school of Capo d’Istrias. It is a spacious stone quadrangle, enclosing a court handsomely railed and gravelled, and furnished with gymnastic apparatus. School was out, and perhaps a hundred and fifty boys were playing in the area. An intelligent-looking man accompanied us through the museum of antiquities, where we saw nothing very much worth noticing, after the collections of Rome, and to the library, where there was a superb bust of Capo d’Istrias, done by a Roman artist. It is a noble head, resembling Washington.

We bought a large basket of grapes for a few cents in returning to the boat, and offered money to one or two common men who had been of assistance to us, but no one would receive it. I italicise the remark, because the Greeks are so often stigmatised as utterly mercenary.

We pulled along the shore, passing round the point on which stands a single fluted column, the only remains of a magnificent temple of Venus, and, getting the wind, hoisted a sail, and ran down the northern side of the island five or six miles, till we arrived opposite the mountain on which stands the temple of Jupiter Panhellenios. The view of it from the sea was like that of a temple drawn on the sky. It occupies the very peak of the mountain, and is seen many miles on either side by the mariner of the Ægæan.

A couple of wild-looking, handsome fellows, bareheaded and bare-legged, with shirts and trousers reaching to the knee, lay in a small caique under the shore; and, as we landed, the taller of the two laid his hand on his breast, and offered to conduct us to the temple. The ascent was about a mile.

We toiled over ploughed fields, with here and there a cluster of fig-trees, wild patches of rock and brier, and an occasional wall, and arrived breathless at the top, where a cool wind met us from the other side of the sea with delicious refreshment.

We sat down among the ruins of the oldest temple of Greece after that of Corinth. Twenty-three noble columns still lifted their heads over us, after braving the tempests of more than two thousand years. The ground about was piled up with magnificent fragments of marble, preserving, even in their fall, the sharp edges of the admirable sculpture of Greece. The Doric capital, the simple frieze, the well-fitted frusta, might almost be restored in the perfection with which they were left by the last touch of the chisel.

The view hence comprised a classic world. There was Athens! The broad mountain over the intensely blue gulf at our feet was Hymettus, and a bright white summit as of a mound between it and the sea, glittering brightly in the sun, was the venerable pile of temples in the Acropolis. To the left, Corinth was distinguishable over its low isthmus, and Megara and Salamis, and following down the wavy line of the mountains of Attica, the promontory of Sunium, modern Cape Colonna, dropped the horizon upon the sea. One might sit out his life amid these loftily-placed ruins, and scarce exhaust in thought the human history that has unrolled within the scope of his eye.

We passed two or three hours wandering about among the broken columns, and gazing away to the main and the distant isles, confessing the surpassing beauty of Greece. Yet have its mountains scarce a green spot, and its vales are treeless and uninhabited, and all that constitutes desolation is there, and strange as it may seem, you neither miss the verdure, nor the people, nor find it desolate. The outline of Greece, in the first place, is the finest in the world. The mountains lean down into the valleys, and the plains swell up to the mountains, and the islands rise from the sea, with a mixture of boldness and grace altogether peculiar. In the most lonely parts of the Ægæan, where you can see no trace of a human foot, it strikes you like a foreign land. Then the atmosphere is its own, and it exceeds that of Italy, far. It gives it the look of a landscape seen through a faintly-teinted glass. Soft blue mists of the most rarefied and changing shapes envelop the mountains on the clearest day, and without obscuring the most distant points perceptibly, give hill and vale a beauty that surpasses that of verdure. I never saw such air as I see in Greece. It has the same effect on the herbless and rocky scenery about us, as a veil over the face of a woman.

The islander who had accompanied us to the temple, stood on a fragment of a column, still as a statue, looking down upon the sea towards Athens. His figure for athletic grace of mould, and his head and features, for the expression of manly beauty and character, might have been models to Phidias. The beautiful and poetical land, of which he inherited his share of unparalleled glory, lay around him. I asked myself why it should have become, as it seems to be, the despair of the philanthropist. Why should its people, who, in the opinion of Childe Harold, are “nature’s favourites still,” be branded and abandoned as irreclaimable rogues, and the source to which we owe, even to this day, our highest models of taste, be neglected and forgotten? The nine days’ enthusiasm for Greece has died away, and she has received a king from a family of despots. But there seems to me in her very beauty, and in the still superior qualities of her children, wherever they have room for competition, a promise of resuscitation. The convulsions of Europe may leave her soon to herself, and the slipper of the Turk, and the hand of the Christian, once lifted fairly from her neck, she will rise, and stand up amid these imperishable temples, once more free!