An old document which I have lighted upon among my
memoranda of travel contains the following:--
_Prayer which I said on the Acropolis when I had succeeded in
understanding the perfect beauty of it_.
"Oh! nobility! Oh! true and simple beauty! Goddess, the worship of
whom signifies reason and wisdom, thou whose temple is an eternal
lesson of conscience and truth, I come late to the threshold of thy
mysteries; I bring to the foot of thy altar much remorse. Ere finding
thee, I have had to make infinite search. The initiation which thou
didst confer by a smile upon the Athenian at his birth I have acquired
by force of reflection and long labour.
"I am born, O goddess of the blue eyes, of barbarian parents,
among the good and virtuous Cimmerians who dwell by the shore of a
melancholy sea, bristling with rocks ever lashed by the storm. The
sun is scarcely known in this country, its flowers are seaweed, marine
plants, and the coloured shells which are gathered in the recesses
of lonely bays. The clouds seem colourless, and even joy is rather
sorrowful there; but fountains of fresh water spring out of the rocks,
and the eyes of the young girls are like the green fountains in which,
with their beds of waving herbs, the sky is mirrored.
"My forefathers, as far as we can trace them, have passed their lives
in navigating the distant seas, which thy Argonauts knew not, I used
to hear as a child the songs which told of voyages to the Pole; I was
cradled amid the souvenir of floating ice, of misty seas like milk,
of islands peopled with birds which now and again would warble, and
which, when they rose in flight, darkened the air.
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