But surely, no voyage in Greece can be called complete which does not include a visit to the famous shrine of Delphi, where the wildness and ruggedness of nature naturally suggest the powers of earth and air, that sway our lives unseen—where the quaking soil and the rent rocks speak a strength above the strength of mortal man—and where a great faith, based upon his deepest hopes and fears, gained a moral empire over all the nation, and exercised it for centuries, to the purifying and the ennobling of the Hellenic race. The oracle is long silent, the priestess forgotten, the temple not only ruined, but destroyed; and yet the grand responses of that noble shrine are not forgotten, nor are they dead. For they have contributed their part and added their element to the general advancement of the world, and to the emancipation of man from immorality and superstition into the true liberty of a good and enlightened conscience. CHAPTER XI. ELIS—OLYMPIA AND ITS GAMES—THE VALLEY OF THE ALPHEUS—MOUNT ERYMANTHUS—PATRAS. The thousands of visitors, whose ships thronged the bay of Katakolo every four years in the great old times, cannot have been fairly impressed with the beauty of the country at first sight. Most other approaches to the coast of Greece are far more striking. For although, on a clear day, the mountains of Arcadia are plainly visible, and form a fine background to the view, from the great bar of Erymanthus on the north, round to the top of Lykæon far south-west, the foreground has not, and never had, either the historic interest or the beauty of the many bays and harbors in other parts of Greece. Yet I am far from asserting that it is actually wanting even in this respect. As we saw the bay in a quiet summer sunset, with placid water reflecting a sleeping cloud and a few idle sails in its amber glow, with a wide circle of low hills and tufted shore bathed in a golden haze, which spread its curtain of light athwart all the distance, so that the great snowy comb of Erymanthus alone seemed suspended by some mystery in the higher blue—the view was not indeed very Greek, but still it was beautiful, and no unsuitable dress wherein the land might clothe itself to welcome the traveller, and foretell him its sunny silence and its golden mystery. The carriage-way along the coast passes by sand-hills, and sandy fields of vines, which were being tilled when we saw them by kindly but squalid peasants, some of whom lived in wretched huts of skins, enclosed with a rough fence. But these were probably only temporary dwellings, for the thrift and diligence of the southern Greek seems hardly compatible with real penury. Mendicancy, except in the case of little children who do it for the nonce, seems unknown in the Morea.