gratifying it. The age of Pericles was the period of the highest
national development. At that time were reared the celebrated
structures in honor of the virgin-goddess who was the patron of
Athens--the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheum--which crowned
the Acropolis, and were the glory of the city as they were the
masterpieces of Grecian architecture. During the preceding half
century many works of utility and of splendor had been constructed,
and the city now became renowned not only in Greece, but throughout
the ancient world, for the magnificence of its public buildings.
Thucydides, writing about this time, says that should Athens be
destroyed, posterity would infer from its ruins that the city had
been twice as populous as it actually was. Demosthenes speaks of
the strangers who came to visit its attractions. But the changes of
twenty-three centuries have passed upon this splendor--a sad story
of violence and neglect--and the queenly city has long been in the
condition of ruin imagined by Thucydides. Still, the spell of her
influence is not broken, and the charm which once drew so many
visitors to her shrines still acts powerfully on the hearts of
scholars in all lands, who, having looked up to her poets, orators
and philosophers as teachers and loved them as friends, long to visit
their haunts, to stand where they stood, to behold the scenes which
they were wont to view, and to gaze upon what may remain of the great
works of art upon which their admiration was bestowed.

So the student-pilgrim from the Western World with native ardor
strains his sight to catch the first glimpse of the Athenian plain and
city. He is fresh from his studies, and familiar with what books teach
of the geography of Greece and the topography of Athens. He needs
not to be informed which mountain-range is Parnes, and which
Pentelicus--which island is Salamis, and which Egina. Yet much of what