But, Notwithstanding
That Allusion, I Would Still Appeal To The Poetry Of His Constitution,
And I Know It Abounds In That Quality.
I am sure that he could not have
looked without emotion on that immortal scene.
I still can remember
that olive-covered plain, that sunset crag, that citadel fane of
ineffable beauty! That was a brilliant civilization, developed by a
gifted race more than two thousand years ago, at a time when the
ancestors of the manufacturers of Manchester, who now clothe the world,
were themselves covered with skins, and tattooed like the red men of
the wilderness. But influences more powerful even than the awful lapse
of time separate and distinguish you from that race. They were the
children of the sun; you live in a distant, a rugged, and northern
clime. They bowed before different altars; they followed different
customs; they were modified by different manners. Votaries of the
Beautiful, they sought in Art the means of embodying their passionate
conceptions: you have devoted your energies to Utility; and by the
means of a power almost unknown to antiquity, by its miraculous
agencies, you have applied its creative force to every combination of
human circumstances that could produce your objects. Yet, amid the toil
and triumphs of your scientific industry, upon you there comes the
undefinable, the irresistible yearning for intellectual refinement - you
build an edifice consecrated to those beautiful emotions and to those
civilizing studies in which they excelled, and you impress upon its
front a name taken from -
"Where on AEgean shores a city rose,
Built nobly, dear the air, and light the soil,
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence."
Beautiful triumph of immortal genius!
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