Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
I grant all this, and much more, if you will; but, recollect, Athens
was the home of the intellectual, and beautiful; not of low mechanical
contrivances, and material organization. Why stop within your lodgings
counting the rents in your wall or the holes in your tiling, when
nature and art call you away? You must put up with such a chamber, and
a table, and a stool, and a sleeping board, any where else in the three
continents; one place does not differ from another indoors; your
magalia in Africa, or your grottos in Syria are not perfection. I
suppose you did not come to Athens to swarm up a ladder, or to grope
about a closet: you came to see and to hear, what hear and see you
could not elsewhere. What food for the intellect is it possible to
procure indoors, that you stay there looking about you? do you think to
read there? where are your books? do you expect to purchase books at
Athens--you are much out in your calculations. True it is, we at this
day, who live in the nineteenth century, have the books of Greece as a
perpetual memorial; and copies there have been, since the time that
they were written; but you need not go to Athens to procure them, nor
would you find them in Athens. Strange to say, strange to the
nineteenth century, that in the age of Plato and Thucydides, there was
not, it is said, a bookshop in the whole place: nor was the book trade
in existence till the very time of Augustus. Libraries, I suspect,
were the bright invention of Attalus or the Ptolemies; I doubt whether
Athens had a library till the reign of Hadrian. It was what the
student gazed on, what he heard, what he caught by the magic of
sympathy, not what he read, which was the education furnished by Athens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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