HELLAS. FROM NAPLES TO ATHENS. "Yet to the remnants of thy splendour past Which sages venerate and bards adore, As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore." I HAD seen the exiled sculptures of the Parthenon in London, the Venus of Melos at the Louvre, strayed among the solemn ruins and through the opulent galleries of Rome, been admitted, as it were, to the very households of the ancients, in the disentombed cities of Campania, and beheld on their walls the reflected glories of Grecian painting, beautiful even in its decline, gazed, too, at Pæstum, in that silent plain by the side of the sea, on a well-nigh perfect image of the Doric temple, simple and elegant, matchless in harmony and repose. Yet all these sights so rich in blessings to a young American scholar—the crown of youthful studies, the realization of boyish dreams but inflamed my longing to wander in that land which in arts, in letters, in all that exalts and dignifies man as an intellectual being, was the mistress and teacher of Rome herself, and still sways her sceptre over the whole civilized world. It was then with a thrill of glad expectation that, on the 4th of May, 1853, I found myself, without companion, on board of a French steamer at Naples, and on my way to the Peiræus. Soon we were floating swiftly over the calm, blue, bright waters of the Mediterranean, along the picturesque coast of old Campania and Lucania, while rocks and hills. and water all were flooded with the soft and living light of an Italian afternoon. Our company presented that variety of nationality and character commonly met with on Mediter ranean steamships. There was a tall, graceful, neat-limbed Arab from Algiers, with his red slippers, loose trousers, and closely fitting fez; a slight, black-eyed Mexican lieutenant of the navy; two Franciscan monks, missionaries from Rome to Constantinople, with shaven crowns, and wearing the coarse brown robe of their order, tied by a rope around the girdle,mild, good-natured, unintelligent, dirty creatures; a Russian gentleman, who was returning to Moscow, after spending several years in the most important countries of Europe, and perfecting himself in their languages, all of which he spoke with the ease and correctness often observable in the educated of his nation; an Italian from Rheggio, who declared to me his enthusiasm for his country's friend, Lord "Bee-ron," and pronounced me happy that I was about to follow his footsteps in the "land of lost gods and godlike men;" an intelligent young Greek from Syra, - doing honor to Mr. Hildner's school, of which he was an alumnus, who did battle, with some Frenchmen, against a thin, melancholy, black-faced Armenian priest, who told them it was a sin to read any book whatever, without first assuring themselves that it had the express sanction of the Church; a few ladies; and the usual number of swarthy Frenchmen, polyglot Germans, and respectable Englishmen with round faces and mutton-chop whiskers. The next morning the mountain isle of Stromboli, the fabled home of Eolus, was close before us, a conical rock, rising boldly from the sea; and Etna showed his summit far in the south. A few hours more brought us to the Straits of Messina, with the farfamed rock of Scylla raising its head modestly enough beneath the highlands of the Italian coast, to the height of about two hundred feet, while to the right, between our ship and the long, low, narrow point of sand on the Sicilian shore of the narrow pass, was the site of the whirlpool of Charybdis. Even at the present day, small vessels are sometimes endangered by its eddies; but it has long lost the terrors with which it is invested in ancient song, whether from the superiority of modern navigation, or from some of the geological changes frequent in this volcanic region; and we no |