In this state of mind, then, I rose at the break of dawn to see whether the window would afford any prospect to serve as a requital for angry sleeplessness. And there, right opposite, stood the rock which of all rocks in the world’s history has done most for literature and art—the rock which poets, and orators, and architects, and historians have ever glorified, and cannot stay their praise—which is ever new and ever old, ever fresh in its decay, ever perfect in its ruin, ever living in its death—the Acropolis of Athens. When I saw my dream and longing of many years fulfilled, the first rays of the rising sun had just touched the heights, while the town below was still hid in gloom. Rock, and rampart, and ruined fanes—all were colored in uniform tints; the lights were of a deep rich orange, and the shadows of dark crimson, with the deeper lines of purple. There was no variety in color between what nature and what man had set there. No whiteness shone from the marble, no smoothness showed upon the hewn and polished blocks; but the whole mass of orange and crimson stood out together into the pale, pure Attic air. There it stood, surrounded by lanes and hovels, still perpetuating the great old contrast in Greek history, of magnificence and meanness—of loftiness and lowness—as well in outer life as in inward motive. And, as it were in illustration of that art of which it was the most perfect bloom, and which lasted in perfection but a day of history, I saw it again and again, in sunlight and in shade, in daylight and at night, but never again in this perfect and singular beauty. If we except the Acropolis, there are only two striking buildings of classical antiquity within the modern town of Athens—the Temple of Theseus and the few standing columns of Hadrian’s great temple to Zeus. The latter is, indeed, very remarkable. The pillars stand on a vacant platform, once the site of the gigantic temple; the Acropolis forms a noble background; away towards Phalerum stretch undulating hills which hide the sea; to the left (if we look from the town), Mount Hymettus raises its barren slopes; and in the valley, immediately below the pillars, flows the famous little Ilisus,(11) glorified for ever by the poetry of Plato, and in its summer-dry bed the fountain Callirrhoe, from which the Athenian maidens still draw water as of old—water the purest and best in the city. It wells out from under a great limestone rock, all plumed with the rich _Capillus Veneris_, which seems to find out and frame with its delicate green every natural spring in Greece.