and headlong in overwhelming invective, or glided melodious in narrative and description, or spread itself out shining in illustration-its course is ever onward, ever entire; never scattered, never stagnant-never sluggish." Oh! for one tone-one living breath of the old oratory from this, its early altar! Oh! for one of those vehement anathemas against Philip, which have spread the fame of Grecian oratory through the long centuries and over wide seas and continents; or even for one of his inferior harangues in favor of Rhodian liberty, or upon the Classes, on the Halonesus, or for the regulation of the State; each and all, compressed with energy and relevant with cogency; ever pervaded by prayerful devotion to the gods and to his native city! But we have no echo here of the mighty voice. Greece is pulseless, and no tone could arouse her now. With the great Past filling the charmed air, we can but stand and wonder-in silence!

Let us ascend that other hill of solid limestone yet nearer the Acropolis. The path upward is rough and uneven from the Bema; although when Paul ascended it, to gratify the Athenian love of novelty, he doubtless surmounted Mars Hill from the other side, where, worn by rain, yet still visible, are steps cut in the solid limestone. I sought my pocket Testament, for here was the spot of sacred oratory.

Boys were flying kites from its summit. Donkeys and sheep were lying lazily around its base. Burs and thistles hang to each spot where vegetation may eke out its scanty subsistence. A tall, flinty cliff rises beyond the city of Athens, which is gathered into a small space below. The long olive plains spread out beneath the eye even to the sea. A column stands on a hill upon the right, still higher than Mars, erected to Philopopus in the first century. Before us is the Acropolis-the invincible and the beautiful-whose store of relics, with their tasteful decorations, "empearl the starless ages" of the world. But here, upon this spot, first broke upon the world of philosophy, that light which alone enunciates the principle of life and immor

tality; that gospel which cast into the shade all the logomachies of the schools and the discoveries of science, which reduces into nothingness even that beautiful system of unity and the highest improvement of reason, which PLATO, walking beneath those green olives upon the left, and in the mellifluousness of his divine tongue, eliminated, unassisted by Revelation. What are they all, compared to the annunciation of Paul from Mars Hill, when he declared to the men of Athens, the unknown God, and that this God made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is Lord of Heaven and earth, dwelling not in TEMPLES made with hands! To feel the force of this declaration, one must stand where Paul stood, and read it in view of the temples, gorgeous and glistening, "springing rounded to columns" from each mound and hill, and especially from that lofty hill to which he doubtless pointed, as he referred-crowned by the most splendid architectural triumph of all time! An illustration thus forcible and striking, could not have fallen upon dull ears. It had its fruit, for we read that Dionysius, the Areopagite, was converted.

There are traces of a church to St. Dionysius, below the northeast corner of the Areopagus, erected to commemorate his conversion. Upon the level of the hill, above the steps spoken of, at the southeast angle of the hill, is a bench, excavated in limestone, forming three sides of a quadrangle. It faces the south. The Areopagus sat here, it is said. Dark, dread, tribunal; in its nightly sittings, uninfluenced by mercy, and hard as its adamantine seats to the approach of clemency!

The Parthenon rises majestically from its solid basis. Although the Venetian has been upon that basis and built his ungainly towers; although the bombs of the Turk, fragments of which we saw, have shattered many a beautiful capital and column; although a magazine here exploded, tearing out the fine sides of this incomparable structure, yet there it stands the glory of the city, and the pride of the sea. The Acropolis itself is 150 feet above the level of the plain. Upon

this is the Temple. In the temple was once the tall statue of Minerva, whose tall spear, tipped with a flag, was the first object which met the returning sailor, as he weathered Cape Sunium. The great plain of the old city spread around. Alas! but a plain compared with that Athens which triumphed at Marathon, Salamis, and Platea. But the eye may yet trace the boundaries of the Academy and the Lyceum; whose systems, false in many respects, detained, by their intellectual spell, the advancing mind of the world for fifteen centuries. The bed of the Illissus-ha! ha! what a river for an American to look at! The Sciota compared to it, is as the Mississippi to the Sciota. The classic stream is but a little dry run, shrunk into nothing, and hardly traceable. The Cephissus, which we crossed in coming to Athens from Pireus, is little larger, but rejoices in a sprinkle of water. Upon the west is the sea, with Salamis bay and isle. The Athenians could easily have seen from this point the battle of Salamis, where Themistocles covered himself with such glory as Grecians alone knew how to bestow. His tomb still looks down, in lonely grandeur, upon the scene of his triumph.

In an opposite direction rise, in serene and dim beauty, the hill Colonos, and the Pentelic mountains, both known in the muse of Sophocles. The stadium, the space over which the charioteers burned to gain the goal, is spread out between us and the distant hills. The theatre of Bacchus, in which the drama of Greece was displayed with its furies, demi-gods, and gods-lies below, marked by a few columns. Other monuments, erected by the Romans, Hadrian's amphitheatre, and such like, are in a better state of preservation.

The temple of Jupiter Olympus detains the eye longer. It was completed by a Roman emperor. Sixteen Corinthian columns yet remain to tell its superiority. Sixty feet high they tower; while anciently they performed the circuit of 2,300 feet. The whole length of the building was 354 feet, and the number of columns was 120. Now as I look at its remains, the eye finds its

area covered by great stacks of wheat, in the process of threshing. Men are superintending. This process was peculiar. Imagine three cultivators, or corn harrows, with teeth turned backward; these chained together, and a man on each; drawn by horses trampling the straw, while men were engaged in stirring it up, and you have a very unscientific description of the threshing process. Women were riding the horses, and stirring the straw, assisting the work. A motley group that, in the temple of Jupiter! Why so much straw here? It is a ridiculous law, that every farmer shall bring his wheat or grain into one point fixed. by the officer, there to be threshed in his presence, so that government may take its toll! American farmers! how would you like that? Jupiter Olympus! would you not upset such a government in a jiffy?

A Spartan band were playing most execrably under the lofty columns of Jupiter's temple. They had come as far as possible out of Athens, in order that they might not be heard. There is more harmony for the eye than the ear upon the Acropolis. The former has not yet been exhausted. The statues, fragments of tracery and inscriptions are gathered here. In each, even though broken and defaced, one may see that excellent device and wonderous slight, which formed so much to gratify the love of beauty. Many a lady at home admires an edging, or interjects in wonder over a figure in a fabric, whose fine original peeps out of the broken Pentelic upon the Acropolis. Many a grace has been stolen by genius from these rude fragments, which now shines in fresh habilaments of stone in the villas of Italy and the homes of England. All the great eras of history are distinguished by some enthusiastic sentiment as a universal principle of action. That period of Grecian glory when the distinguishing sentiment was most prominent was that of Pericles; and that sentiment was an intense love of the beautiful, not alone in form, but in idea. If a fane of alabaster rose gracefully under the enchanting sky, amid its groves of myrtles and olives, waving under the gentle breeze, there was also an answering

soul of beauty dilating under its shadows, at the vision of truth serene, spreading graces forth, and visible in their beauty.

PLATO-all radiant and divine; what soul, unassisted by direct intercourse with its Maker, ever dared a bolder flight than his, toward that Christianity which God incarnate came to teach! Did he not dedicate his youth at the feet of Socrates, and his old age in yonder grove, the first fruits and the latter growth, to the upbuilding of the fairest fabric which human Reason ever reared in honor of its Maker? Where is the rule of life, the sentiment of affection, the profound thought, which he has not touched and adorned? Did he not probe the deepest truth in Nature, when he said: "Let us declare the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the Universe. He was good; and he who is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things should be as much as possible like himself. All things are for the sake of the good, and it is the cause of every thing beautiful." In one thing only did he fail. He gave no authoritative rule of duty, for he was not commissioned from on high. Oh! if his seraphic soul could have seen that glory which beamed in the mild star of Bethlehem, and could have listened to the eloquent Apostle from Mars Hill, as he dissipated the mists of all the schools, by declaring that " He gave to all, life and breath and all things," and that "in Him we live and move and have our being,”—what rapture would not his great mind have felt, what humility would have graced the seer of Academus !

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Such reflections, and such like, have made our visit to Athens one of deepest interest. It is not the modern city-not the temples of Victory, of the Winds, of Bacchus, or of Jupiter even,-it is not the prison cut in the rock, and pointed out to us as the abode of Socrates in his last hours,—it is not the fountains and caves, not any external form of Nature or Art, which gives to Greece its never-dying spell of enchantment. Athens lies calmly beautiful to the mental eye, as the old haunt of Wisdom, Poetry, Oratory, Art, and Heroism. The eye seeks