The
Roman Remains Which Lie In The Town Below Look Like The Works Of
Barbarians Beside These Perfect Structures.
They jar strangely on
the eye, after it has been accustoming itself to perfect harmony
and proportions.
If, as the schoolmaster tells us, the Greek
writing is as complete as the Greek art; if an ode of Pindar is as
glittering and pure as the Temple of Victory; or a discourse of
Plato as polished and calm as yonder mystical portico of the
Erechtheum: what treasures of the senses and delights of the
imagination have those lost to whom the Greek books are as good as
sealed!
And yet one meets with very dull first-class men. Genius won't
transplant from one brain to another, or is ruined in the carriage,
like fine Burgundy. Sir Robert Peel and Sir John Hobhouse are both
good scholars; but their poetry in Parliament does not strike one
as fine. Muzzle, the schoolmaster, who is bullying poor trembling
little boys, was a fine scholar when he was a sizar, and a ruffian
then and ever since. Where is the great poet, since the days of
Milton, who has improved the natural offshoots of his brain by
grafting it from the Athenian tree?
I had a volume of Tennyson in my pocket, which somehow settled that
question, and ended the querulous dispute between me and
Conscience, under the shape of the neglected and irritated Greek
muse, which had been going on ever since I had commenced my walk
about Athens. The old spinster saw me wince at the idea of the
author of Dora and Ulysses, and tried to follow up her advantage by
farther hints of time lost, and precious opportunities thrown away.
"You might have written poems like them," said she; "or, no, not
like them perhaps, but you might have done a neat prize poem, and
pleased your papa and mamma. You might have translated Jack and
Jill into Greek iambics, and been a credit to your college." I
turned testily away from her. "Madam," says I, "because an eagle
houses on a mountain, or soars to the sun, don't you be angry with
a sparrow that perches on a garret window, or twitters on a twig.
Leave me to myself: look, my beak is not aquiline by any means."
And so, my dear friend, you who have been reading this last page in
wonder, and who, instead of a description of Athens, have been
accommodated with a lament on the part of the writer, that he was
idle at school, and does not know Greek, excuse this momentary
outbreak of egotistic despondency. To say truth, dear Jones, when
one walks among the nests of the eagles, and sees the prodigious
eggs they laid, a certain feeling of discomfiture must come over us
smaller birds. You and I could not invent - it even stretches our
minds painfully to try and comprehend part of the beauty of the
Parthenon - ever so little of it, - the beauty of a single column, - a
fragment of a broken shaft lying under the astonishing blue sky
there, in the midst of that unrivalled landscape.
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