Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
must turn for the sympathy we seek to yon pilgrim student come from a
semi-barbarous land to that small corner of the earth, as to a shrine,
where he might take his fill of gazing on those emblems and
coruscations of invisible unoriginate perfection. It was the stranger
from a remote province, from Britain or from Mauritania, who in a scene
so different from that of his chilly, woody swamps, or of his fiery
choking sands, learned at once what a real University must be, by
coming to understand the sort of country, which was its suitable home.
Nor was this all that a University required, and found in Athens. No
one, even there, could live on poetry. If the students at that famous
place had nothing better than bright hues and soothing sounds, they
would not have been able or disposed to turn their residence there to
much account. Of course they must have the means of living, nay, in a
certain sense, of enjoyment; if Athens was to be an Alma Mater at the
time, or to remain afterwards a pleasant thought in their memory. And
so they had: be it recollected Athens was a port, and a mart of trade,
perhaps the first in Greece; and this was very much to the point, when
a number of strangers were ever flocking to it, whose combat was to be
with intellectual, not physical difficulties, and who claimed to have
their bodily wants supplied, that they might be at leisure to set about
furnishing their minds. Now, barren as was the soil of Attica, and
bare the face of the country, yet it had only too many resources for an
elegant, nay luxurious abode there. So abundant were the imports of
the place, that it was a common saying, that the productions, which
were found singly elsewhere, were brought all together in Athens. Corn
and wine, the staple of subsistence in such a climate, came from the
isles of the Aegean; fine wool and carpeting from Asia Minor; slaves,
as, now, from the Euxine, and timber too; and iron and brass from the
coasts of the Mediterranean. The Athenian did not condescend to
manufactures himself, but encouraged them in others; and a population
of foreigners caught at the lucrative occupation both for home
consumption and for exportation. Their cloth, and other textures for
dress and furniture, and their hardware--for instance, armour--were in
great request. Labour was cheap; stone and marble in plenty; and the
taste and skill, which at first were devoted to public buildings, as
temples and porticos, were in course of time applied to the mansions of
public men. If nature did much for Athens, it is undeniable that art
did much more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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