The Cruise of the Branwen

THE CRUISE OF THE BRANWEN portion, whose victory over the Barbarians had been won .as much by the intelligence of their brains as by the courage of their hearts, who here determined to put into tangible, eternal form those disembodied theories of philosophic reason which they knew and felt. Yet between us and them the Parthenon is the link the traveller chooses, though this building, ruined by centuries of man's neglect, by years of conscious vandalism, obscured by age-long mists of new religions that rise from the v~ry soil and well-nigh veil its snowy outlines from the sun, must be almost unintelligible to the Christian of the twentieth century. Too see the meaning of that severely splendid embodiment of the best which paganism could bestow, you must arouse the ancestral Pagan who lies sleeping in the tissues of us all, you must ·strip off that temporary obsession which clings so close and hard around the heart of us, or you will lose ymu way amid the blinding sunlight of a Past where only the best and most sincere of you may walk, of an age in which you too have had your share, however dim and distant are its traces in your being. Modern Athens will help you no wise in this conscious effort. Even its tiny churches, like withered beldames crouching in a corner of the market place, are silent of a Past that had vanished before they were born, are sitent even of the years that saw their birth or saw the very stone brought here from Cana on which the water was made wine. There is no help in things visible. Nor can you long postpone the inevitable test. Like 50