stration: VIEW OF THE ACROPOLIS AND THE COLUMNS OF THE TEMPLE OF
JUPITER OLYMPUS.]

It was a fitting site for the capital of a people keenly sensitive to
beauty, and destined to become the leaders of the world in matters
of taste, especially in the important department of the Fine Arts.
Nowhere are there more charming contrasts of mountain, sea and
plain--nowhere a more perfect harmony of picturesque effect. The sea
is not a dreary waste of waters without bounds, but a smiling gulf
mirroring its mountain-walls and winding about embosomed isles, yet
ever broadening as it recedes, and suggesting the mighty flood beyond
from which it springs. The plain is not an illimitable expanse over
which the weary eye ranges in vain in quest of some resting-place, but
is so small as to be embraced in its whole contour in a single view,
while its separate features--the broad, dense belt of olives which
marks the bed of its principal stream, the ancient Cephissus, the
vineyards, the grain-fields and the sunny hillside pastures--are made
to produce their full impression. The mountains are not near enough to
be obtrusive, much less oppressive; neither are they so distant as to
be indistinct or to seem insignificant. Seen through the clear air,
their naked summits are so sharply defined and so individual in
appearance as to seem almost like sculptured forms chiseled out of the
hard rock.

The city which rose upon this favored spot was worthy of its
surroundings. The home of a free and enterprising race endowed with
rare gifts of intellect and sensibility, and ever on the alert for
improvement, it became the nurse of letters and of arts, while the
luxury begotten of prosperity awakened a taste for adornment, and
the wealth acquired by an extended commerce furnished the means of
gratifying it. The age of Pericles was the period of the highest
national development. At that time were reared the celebrated
structures in honor of the virgin-goddess who was the patron of
Athens--the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheum--which crowned
the Acropolis, and were the glory of the city as they were the
masterpieces of Grecian architecture. During the preceding half
century many works of utility and of splendor had been constructed,
and the city now became renowned not only in Greece, but throughout
the ancient world, for the magnificence of its public buildings.
Thucydides, writing about this time, says that should Athens be
destroyed, posterity