n. I
suppose you did not come to Athens to swarm up a ladder, or to grope
about a closet: you came to see and to hear, what hear and see you
could not elsewhere. What food for the intellect is it possible to
procure indoors, that you stay there looking about you? do you think to
read there? where are your books? do you expect to purchase books at
Athens--you are much out in your calculations. True it is, we at this
day, who live in the nineteenth century, have the books of Greece as a
perpetual memorial; and copies there have been, since the time that
they were written; but you need not go to Athens to procure them, nor
would you find them in Athens. Strange to say, strange to the
nineteenth century, that in the age of Plato and Thucydides, there was
not, it is said, a bookshop in the whole place: nor was the book trade
in existence till the very time of Augustus. Libraries, I suspect,
were the bright invention of Attalus or the Ptolemies; I doubt whether
Athens had a library till the reign of Hadrian. It was what the
student gazed on, what he heard, what he caught by the magic of
sympathy, not what he read, which was the education furnished by Athens.

He leaves his narrow lodging early in the morning; and not till night,
if even then, will he return. It is but a crib or kennel,--in which he
sleeps when the weather is inclement or the ground damp; in no respect
a home. And he goes out of doors, not to read the day's newspaper, or
to buy the gay shilling volume, but to imbibe the invisible atmosphere
of genius, and to learn by heart the oral traditions of taste. Out he
goes; and, leaving the tumble-down town behind him, he mounts the
Acropolis to the right, or he turns to the Areopagus on the left. He
goes to the Parthenon to study the sculptures of Phidias; to the temple
of the Dioscuri to see the paintings of Polygnotus. We indeed take our
Sophocles or Aeschylus out of our coat-pocket; but, if our sojourner at
Athens would understand how a tragic poet can write, he must betake
himself to the theatre on the south, and see and hear the drama
literally in action. Or let him go westward to the Agora, and there he
will hear Lysias or Andocides pleading, or Demosthenes haranguing. He
goes farther west still, along the shade of those noble planes, which
Cimon has planted there; and he looks around him at the statues and
porticos and vestibules, each by itself a work of genius and skill,
enough to be the making o