Greek. Infinitely as most northerns, we children of mists, clouds, woods, and weeping rain, may prefer the beauty of mystery and indefiniteness, that is, romantic beauty, still we may feel a keen pleasure in definite beauty, so mightily triumphant as it is in the Parthenon and Olympeion and the gorgeous Propylæa, if gorgeousness can be predicated of a splendor pure even to severity. Anything elaborate, except in details of workmanship, would have of fended the Greek in a religious edifice. His alacrity of thought was such, that even symbolical religion must be presented to him in delicate hints, where the symbols were few, pure and simple. It must not be wrought out before him. Yet with that alacrity he had depth also. And all this is really impressed upon the temples. It is definite beauty, shapely vastness, instantaneously recognized unity, cheerful grandeur.

I am sure classical architecture would not in any length of time force me to break the natural allegiance which, from climate, descent, and religion, I owe to Gothic; but I never shall forget the electrical effect produced upon me by seeing the blue sky between the two columns of the steps of the Propylæa. The shape, the tallness which made the space seem narrow, the straight hard line which made the form so definite, all startled my eye with its firm and stable symmetry, after I had been so long accustomed to the bending, reverently swerving lines of a cathedral, and to the bold and trustful

But

swing of the Gothic arch, throwing itself from pillar to pillar, with its half-circle, as imperfect as a Christian truth here below, whose other half is in Heaven. Yet, the evening before, the glowing west through Hadrian's arch-how different it was from the same bright sky through the columns of the Propyläa. I felt as if I had been surprised into a confession, and, as in my dream at Lebadea, I was pleasingly bewildered between two sorts of beauty, and the two provinces of great truths typified by those separate beauties. I felt as if I had been surprised into a confession of preference for classical beauty. the arch of Hadrian, by a quick admonition, saved me from attributing to the Greek religion too much of a fixedness, and from forgetting that exquisite pliability, whereby the classical spirit, in art, taste, faith, and morals, touches upon and for a moment mixes with the spirit of romance, its gentle awe and soul-chastening shadows. I turned round to the Acropolis, that old, immortal rock, and could have addressed it, as the representative of Greece, in the sublime words of the great doctor and prophet of romantic philosophy among ourselves, teaching out of Spenser's holy chair.

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Triumphant o'er this pompous show

Of art, this palpable array of sense,
On every side encountered; in despite
Of the gross fictions, chanted in the streets
By wandering rhapsodists; and in contempt.
Of doubt and bold denials hourly urged

Amid the wrangling schools-a SPIRIT hung,
Beautiful region! o'er thy towns and farms,
Statues and temples and memorial tombs;
And emanations were perceived; and acts
Of immortality in nature's course,
Exemplified by mysteries, that were felt
As bonds, on grave philosopher imposed
And armed warrior; and in every grove
A gay or pensive tenderness prevailed,
When piety more awful had relaxed!"

It may be asked, if there were all this divinity and truth and more than mortal wisdom embodied in the Greek paganism, and pervading their art and literature, why did not the Church refil the empty form of Greek civilization, and give Greece a second epoch of greatness, as she did to Italy? Among other reasons this may be assigned, that in the Greek intellect and faith the first Christian element was wanting, namely, fear.

But enough of heathen Athens; let us descend from the Acropolis, and muse awhile this evening on the Areopagus. It is another lovely evening, the charm of this land: and now a balmy coolness has succeeded to the burning day, and there is fragrance from the cut hay beyond the Pnyx which is most refreshing. Here let us muse on Christian Athens. It is true, and perhaps the reason urged above may account for this also, that Athens stands not foremost among the cities whose names are honorable in

Church history, as Alexandria, Constantinople, or the venerated Rome. Yet it is not without some Christian history interesting to a churchman, though it be overshadowed by its ancient heathen greatness. For the most part our thoughts of Athens terminate with the history of Alexander's successors, and the struggles consequent upon the partition of his unknit empire. Here the annals of classical Athens seem to end. Then come some few interesting and almost domestic notices of her, as she was beneath her Roman lords,—her schools, refining influence, parts of Cicero's letters, and the like; and she claims a distinct chapter in the chronicle of the reigns of Hadrian, and the Antonines. But there is one page in the history of Christian Athens, of a domestic nature perhaps, yet not unworthy to be coupled in a churchman's memory with the visit of St. Paul, the sermon on Mars' Hill, and the conversion of St. Dionysius. It is the gleam thrown on the records of the university of Athens in the biographies of St. Basil and St. Gregory Nazianzen. The influence Athens had in forming the minds of these two great men, the deep, profound Divine, and the keen, melodious Preacher, their having been here with Julian, the apostate emperor, whose mind from the same scenes and in the same place took such a fatally opposite bias, feeding a temper naturally crooked upon the bitter contemplation of family wrongs, the interesting record of the growing friendship of Basil and Gregory,

and the subsequent unworthy coldness, all naturally rise to mind in such a locality as the Areopagus. There is in Cave's Life of St. Basil a very amusing account of the boyish and annoying ceremonies to which freshmen were subjected at Athens by their brother undergraduates, and from which the grave St. Basil was excused. "The fame of so excellent a person had beforehand prepared men's minds, and made that university big with expectations of his coming, and every one was contriving how to gain him for their pupil. It was the custom at Athens, for the youth of the university to lie in wait for the arrival of young students, to beset all ways and tracts, all ports and passages, that so first seizing upon them, they might either persuade or draw them in to be their fellow-pupils, thinking by this means to oblige their masters, and outvie the train of other professors, between whom there used to be great clashing and emulation. Having gained the freshman, their first care was to lodge him in the house of some friend, or countryman, or at least of one of those setters that plied up and down in the behalf of that sophist who was to be his tutor. Next they gave way to any that would, to pose him with hard questions, and to run him down with quirks and subtleties, which were either more rude or ingenuous, according to the humor and education of him that put them. This they did, to baffle the good conceit of himself, which the young man was supposed to bring along with him; and from the