ound
him, it is not difficult to conceive that, to superficial observers,
Lord Byron at Athens might have appeared an untouched spectator of
much that throws ordinary travellers into, at least, verbal raptures.
For pretenders of every sort, whether in taste or morals, he
entertained, at all times, the most profound contempt; and if,
frequently, his real feelings of admiration disguised themselves under
an affected tone of indifference and mockery, it was out of pure
hostility to the cant of those, who, he well knew, praised without any
feeling at all. It must be owned, too, that while he thus justly
despised the raptures of the common herd of travellers, there were
some pursuits, even of the intelligent and tasteful, in which he took
but very little interest. With the antiquarian and connoisseur his
sympathies were few and feeble:--"I am not a collector," he says, in
one of his notes on Childe Harold, "nor an admirer of collections."
For antiquities, indeed, unassociated with high names and deeds, he
had no value whatever; and of works of art he was content to admire
the general effect, without professing, or aiming at, any knowledge of
the details. It was to nature, in her lonely scenes of grandeur and
beauty, or as at Athens, shining, unchanged, among the ruins of glory
and of art, that the true fervid homage of his whole soul was paid. In
the few notices of his travels, appended to Childe Harold, we find the
sites and scenery of the different places he visited far more fondly
dwelt upon than their classic or historical associations. To the
valley of Zitza he reverts, both in prose and verse, with a much
warmer recollection than to Delphi or the Troad; and the plain of
Athens itself is chiefly praised by him as "a more glorious prospect
than even Cintra or Istambol." Where, indeed, could Nature assert such
claims to his worship as in scenes like these, where he beheld her
blooming, in indestructible beauty, amid the wreck of all that man
deems most worthy of duration? "Human institutions," says Harris,
"perish, but Nature is permanent:"--or, as Lord Byron has amplified
this thought[133] in one of his most splendid passages:--

"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The free-born wanderer