balloon. We saw no semblance of a street, but every house, every window,
every clinging vine, every projection was as distinct and sharply marked
as if the time were noon-day; and yet there was no glare, no glitter,
nothing harsh or repulsive--the noiseless city was flooded with the
mellowest light that ever streamed from the moon, and seemed like some
living creature wrapped in peaceful slumber. On its further side was a
little temple, whose delicate pillars and ornate front glowed with a rich
lustre that chained the eye like a spell; and nearer by, the palace of
the king reared its creamy walls out of the midst of a great garden of
shrubbery that was flecked all over with a random shower of amber lights
--a spray of golden sparks that lost their brightness in the glory of the
moon, and glinted softly upon the sea of dark foliage like the pallid
stars of the milky-way. Overhead the stately columns, majestic still in
their ruin--under foot the dreaming city--in the distance the silver sea
--not on the broad earth is there an other picture half so beautiful!

As we turned and moved again through the temple, I wished that the
illustrious men who had sat in it in the remote ages could visit it again
and reveal themselves to our curious eyes--Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes,
Socrates, Phocion, Pythagoras, Euclid, Pindar, Xenophon, Herodotus,
Praxiteles and Phidias, Zeuxis the painter. What a constellation of
celebrated names! But more than all, I wished that old Diogenes, groping
so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously for one solitary
honest man in all the world, might meander along and stumble on our
party. I ought not to say it, may be, but still I suppose he would have
put out his light.

We left the Parthenon to keep its watch over old Athens, as it had kept
it for twenty-three hundred years, and went and stood outside the walls
of the citadel. In the distance was the ancient, but still almost