as seen many lands and tried to distinguish their essential
characters, than the fact that no one country exactly resembles
another, but that, however similar in climate and locality, each
presents a peculiar and well-marked property belonging to itself
alone. The specific quality of Athenian landscape is light--not
richness or sublimity or romantic loveliness or grandeur of mountain
outline, but luminous beauty, serene exposure to the airs of heaven.
The harmony and balance of the scenery, so varied in its details and
yet so comprehensible, are sympathetic to the temperance of Greek
morality, the moderation of Greek art. The radiance with which it is
illuminated has all the clearness and distinction of the Attic
intellect. From whatever point the plain of Athens with its
semicircle of greater and lesser hills may be surveyed, it always
presents a picture of dignified and lustrous beauty. The Acropolis
is the centre of this landscape, splendid as a work of art with its
crown of temples; and the sea, surmounted by the long low hills of
the Morea, is the boundary to which the eye is irresistibly led.
Mountains and islands and plain alike are made of limestone,
hardening here and there into marble, broken into delicate and
varied forms, and sprinkled with a vegetation of low shrubs and
brushwood so sparse and slight that the naked rock in every
direction meets the light. This rock is grey and colourless: viewed
in the twilight of a misty day, it shows the dull, tame uniformity
of bone. Without the sun it is asleep and sorrowful. But by reason
of this very deadness, the limestone of Athenian landscape is always
ready to take the colours of the air and sun. In noonday it smiles
with silvery lustre, fold upon fold of the indented hills and
islands melting from the brightness of the sea into the untempered
brilliance of the sky. At dawn and sunset the same rocks array
themselves with a celestial robe of rainbow-woven hues: islands,
sea, and mountains, far and near, burn with saffron, violet, and
rose, with the tints of beryl and topaz, sapphire and almandine and
amethyst, each in due order and at proper distances. The fabled
dolphin in its death could not have showed a more brilliant
succession of splendours waning into splendours through the whole
chord of prismatic colours. This sensitiveness of the Attic
limestone to every modification of the sky's light gives a peculiar
spirituality to the landscape. The hills remain in fo