e which scented all the air, and
to enjoy the distant prospects, rich in natural beauty, rich too in
memories of the legendary and historic past. To the south the finely-cut
peak of Helicon peered over the low intervening hills. In the west
loomed the mighty mass of Parnassus, its middle slopes darkened by
pine-woods like shadows of clouds brooding on the mountain-side; while
at its skirts nestled the ivy-mantled walls of Daulis overhanging the
deep glen, whose romantic beauty accords so well with the loves and
sorrows of Procne and Philomela, which Greek tradition associated
with the spot. Northwards, across the broad plain to which the hill
of Panopeus descends, steep and bare, the eye rested on the gap in the
hills through which the Cephissus winds his tortuous way to flow under
grey willows, at the foot of barren stony hills, till his turbid waters
lose themselves, no longer in the vast reedy swamps of the now vanished
Copaic Lake, but in the darkness of a cavern in the limestone rock.
Eastward, clinging to the slopes of the bleak range of which the hill
of Panopeus forms part, were the ruins of Chaeronea, the birthplace of
Plutarch; and out there in the plain was fought the disastrous battle
which laid Greece at the feet of Macedonia. There, too, in a later age
East and West met in deadly conflict, when the Roman armies under Sulla
defeated the Asiatic hosts of Mithridates. Such was the landscape spread
out before me on one of those farewell autumn days of almost pathetic
splendour, when the departing summer seems to linger fondly, as if loth
to resign to winter the enchanted mountains of Greece. Next day the
scene had changed: summer was gone. A grey November mist hung low on the
hills which only yesterday had shone resplendent in the sun, and under
its melancholy curtain the dead flat of the Chaeronean plain, a wide
treeless expanse shut in by desolate slopes, wore an aspect of chilly
sadness befitting the battlefield where a nation's freedom was lost.

But crowded as the prospect from Panopeus is with memories of the past,
the place itself, now so still and deserted, was once the scene of an
event even more ancient and memorable, if Greek story-tellers can be
trusted. For here, they say, the sage Prometheus created our first
parents by fashioning them, like a potter, out of clay. (Pausanias X.
4.4. Compare Apollodorus, "Bibliotheca", I. 7. 1; Ovid, "Metamorph."
I. 82 sq.; Juvenal, "Sat". XIV. 35. According to ano