How I Found Livingstone Travels, Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo by William Makepeace Thackeray







 -   The
Roman remains which lie in the town below look like the works of
barbarians beside these perfect structures.  They - Page 35
How I Found Livingstone Travels, Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo by William Makepeace Thackeray - Page 35 of 126 - First - Home

Enter page number    Previous Next

Number of Words to Display Per Page: 250 500 1000

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.

Enter page number   Previous Next
Page 35 of 126
Words from 17734 to 18259 of 65663


Previous 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Next

More links: First 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
 110 120 Last

Display Words Per Page: 250 500 1000

 
Africa (29)
Asia (27)
Europe (59)
North America (58)
Oceania (24)
South America (8)
 

List of Travel Books RSS Feeds

Africa Travel Books RSS Feed

Asia Travel Books RSS Feed

Europe Travel Books RSS Feed

North America Travel Books RSS Feed

Oceania Travel Books RSS Feed

South America Travel Books RSS Feed

Copyright © 2005 - 2022 Travel Books Online