The Cruise of the Branwen

THE CRUISE OF THE BRANWEN reference to .any other's work. So laboured the -editors of Homer, till Berard took them into Homer's seas. So there is little of that unity in modern life or thought which architectural conceptions can best reflect. In Greece, as I have said, the unity and harmony of thought and life was the one essential characteristic which the citizens of Pericles desired to see embodied in the Parthenon. I shall have something more to say on this difficult subject in a later chapter. I have confined myself, now and here, only to first impressions. And even our first impressions of Hellenic soil were not given us by the miracle of the Acropolis or by the art of ancient Greece. They swept upon us with the dust and glare of modern Athens, which at first seemed to reproduce a great deal of the aspect and even more of the language of a provincial capital in southern France. Yet over all the bustle and confusion of each day's activity there remained the conscious– ness that the Acropolis was somewhere near at hand. I may compare it, perhaps, to the feeling some of Napoleon's soldiers must have had, drawn up in line beneath the shadow of the Pyramids. For the weight of more than twenty centuries was in the gaze that seemed bent down on us from thpse inviolate heights above the city. I cannot better express that feeling than by printing at the end of this chapter the Greek ode written for the Games of 1896 (the first of the new series of official Olympiads) by Mr. G. S. Robert– son, who kindly allows me to reproduce his 54