ponder it well, for
it is true--with a living belief, under whatsoever confusions and
divisions of personality, in a God who loved, taught, inspired men, a
just God who befriended the righteous cause, the cause of freedom and
patriotism, a Deity, the echo of whose mind and will to man was the song
of Athene on Olympus, when she

Chanted of order and right, and of foresight, and order of peoples;
Chanted of labour and craft, wealth in the port and the garner;
Chanted of valour and fame, and the man who can fall with the
foremost,
Fighting for children and wife, and the field which his father
bequeathed him.
Sweetly and cunningly sang she, and planned new lessons for mortals.
Happy who hearing obey her, the wise unsullied Athene.

Ah, that they had always obeyed her, those old Greeks. But meanwhile, as
I said, the agony had been extreme. If Athens had sinned, she had been
purged as by fire; and the fire--surely of God--had been terrible.
Northern Greece had either been laid waste with fire and sword, or had
gone over to the Persian, traitors in their despair. Attica, almost the
only loyal state, had been overrun; the old men, women, and children had
fled to the neighbouring islands, or to the Peloponnese. Athens itself
had been destroyed; and while young Sophocles was dancing round the
trophy at Salamis, the Acropolis was still a heap of blackened ruins.

But over and above their valour, over and above their loyalty, over and
above their exquisite aesthetic faculty, these Athenians had a resilience
of self-reliant energy, like that of the French--like that, to do you but
justice, of your Americans after your Chicago fire; and Athens rose from
her ashes to be awhile, not only, as she had nobly earned by suffering
and endurance, the leading state in Greece, but a mighty fortress, a rich
commercial port, a living centre of art, poetry, philosophy, such as this
earth has never seen before or since.

On the plateau of that little crag of the Acropolis some 800 feet in
length, by 400 in breadth--about the size and shape of the Castle Rock at
Edinburgh--was gathered, within forty years of the battle of Salamis,
more and more noble beauty than ever stood together on any other spot of
like size.

The sudden relief from crushing pressure, and the joyous consciousness of
well-earned honours, made the whole spirit-nature of the people blossom
out, as it were, into manifold forms of activity,