Her next pilgrimage was to classic Greece, the land of Solon and Lycurgus, Pericles and Pisistratus, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Demosthenes--the land of Byron and Shelley--the land of poetry and patriotism, of the myths of gods and the histories of heroes--the land which Art and Nature have fondly combined to enrich with their choicest treasures. The impression it made upon her was profound. Writing at Athens, she says:-- "I confess that the effect produced upon me here by life and the surrounding objects makes me almost dread to remain for any length of time; dread, lest beneath this clear Olympian heaven, and amid all the delightful entertainment offered to the senses, it might be possible, not, indeed, to forget, but to feel much less forcibly the great aim and purpose of that life for which the God-Man lived, died, and rose again from the dead. 'They who cannot bear strong wines should not make use of them.' For this reason, therefore, I shall soon leave Greece, and return to my Northern home, the cloudy skies and long winters of which will not delude me into finding an earthly existence too bewitchingly beautiful. Yet am I glad that I shall be able to say to the men and women in the far North, 'If there be any one among you who suffers both in body and soul from the bleak cold of the North, or from the heavy burden of its life, let him come hither. Not to Italy, where prevails too much sirocco, and the rain, when it once begins, rains as if it would never leave off; no, but hither, where the air is pure as the atmosphere of freedom, the heavens as free from cloud as the dwellings of the gods; where the temples on the heights lift the glance upwards, and the sea and the mountains expand vast horizons to the eye, rich in colour, in thought, and in feeling; where all things are full of hope-awakening life--antiquity, the present, and the future. Let him, beneath the sacred colonnades on the hills, or in the shade of the classic groves in the valleys, listen anew to the divine Plato, enjoy the grapes of the vales of Athene, the figs from the native village of Socrates, honey from the thyme-scented hills of Hymettus and Cithaeron, feed the glance and the mind, the soul and the body, daily with that old, ever-young beauty--that which was, and that which now springs up to new life, and he will be restored to his usual vigour of health; or, dying, will thank God that the earth can become a vestibule to the Father's home above.'"[15]