le coast of Attica, her
hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, &c. &c. are
in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of
Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. But am I to
be told that the "nature" of Attica would be _more_ poetical without
the "art" of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus? and of the
still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial
genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the
Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape
Colonna, or the Cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it, or the
recollection that Falconer's _ship_ was bulged upon them? There are a
thousand rocks and capes far more picturesque than those of the
Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what are they to a thousand
scenes in the wilder parts of Greece, of Asia Minor, Switzerland, or
even of Cintra in Portugal, or to many scenes of Italy, and the
Sierras of Spain? But it is the "_art_," the columns, the temples,
the wrecked vessel, which give them their antique and their modern
poetry, and not the spots themselves. Without them, the _spots_ of
earth would be unnoticed and unknown; buried, like Babylon and
Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without
existence; but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were
transported, if they were _capable_ of transportation, like the
obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon's head, _there_ they would
still exist in the perfection of their beauty, and in the pride of
their poetry. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins
from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I do
so? The _ruins_ are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the
Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them.
Such is the poetry of art.

Mr. Bowles contends again that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical,
because of "the association with boundless deserts," and that a
"pyramid of the same dimensions" would not be sublime in "Lincoln's
Inn Fields:" not _so_ poetical certainly; but take away the
"pyramids," and what is the "_desert?"_ Take away Stone-henge from
Salisbury plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow heath, or any
other unenclosed down. It appears to me that St. Peter's, the
Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the
Venus di Medicis, the Hercules, the dying Gladiator, the Moses of
Michael Angelo, and all the high