If any work of man’s hands can purge the mind of the commonplace, it is the Propylæa, imposing in its grand proportions, yet enticing by its beauty. Through this the pilgrim now passes and is alone with Greek life. Although the plateau is deserted, the temple in ruins, there is no sense of death. There is rather a sudden sense of Beauty set free from the trammels of daily life. The fortunate isolation of the hilltop contributes to this effect. Byzantine makeshifts, Turkish hovels and minarets, have all been swept away—even the intruding Roman is left outside with the disfiguring pedestal of Agrippa’s statue. The foreground of the modern city is sunk out of sight behind the rim of the plateau. There is to be seen on all sides only the same Attic plain, the same Ægean sea, and the same horizon of mountains, which the eyes of kings and democrats, artists, orators and philosophers have looked upon in days gone by. In this harmony of surroundings, the eye and thought rest undisturbed upon the Parthenon. The tributes of the centuries have probably left the visitor unprepared for his own emotion. Like a wind on the mountain, felling the strong oak trees, the heavenly Eros, Plato’s Love of Beauty, descends upon him. Bayard Taylor’s first impressions, in spite of an enthusiasm permissible fifty years ago but now well-nigh out of print, are worth recalling for the sake of a figure evoked by the appalling ruin of beauty. Beyond a sea “of hewn and sculptured marble, drums of pillars, pedestals, capitals, cornices, friezes, triglyphs and sunken panel-work,” he saw the Parthenon against the sky, and it seemed to him as if it lay “broken down to the earth in the middle like a ship which has struck and parted, with the roof, cornices and friezes mostly gone and not a single column unmutilated, and yet with the tawny gold of two thousand years staining its once spotless marble, sparkling with snow-white marks of shot and shell, and with its soaring pillars embedded in the dark blue ether.” But since Morosini’s sacrilegious bomb did its work the generations have refused to accept as the ultimate fact the shipwreck of this temple in which culminated the plastic arts of ancient Greece and in which were typified her loftiest ideas. Poet and philosopher have sat before it in fruitful meditation, and commoners have paced its great colonnades, unregardful of the ways and marts of men amid the austere majesty and royal repose of the Doric pillars. From the imperious beauty of the Parthenon the eye turns gratefully to the lovely Erechtheum. Although this is but a torso of the architect’s design and its complex structure defies preconceived conventions, its Ionic charm satisfies in each detail. The eastern columns, the Porch of the Maidens, the exquisite tracery of the doorway set within the perfectly proportioned northern porch present a series rather than a unity of graceful designs.