The ascent is long; to any but the young and active or else the practised mountaineer it is toilsome. But the toil is broken by the relics on which we stop to gaze on our path; it is repaid by the mighty landscapes on which we gaze. It is not too much to say that we look on Hellas from its centre. The small ruined church on the height brings Akrokorinthos within the company of the sacred hills of Christendom, the hills where a sanctuary on the height looks down on town or city at its feet. Cashel has been seized by another hand as a parallel to the akropolis of Athens; a miniature more like the model is found in our own island, where the Tor of Glastonbury looks down on the battle-fields of Western England. Nearer in size however, in the mountain fittings of the landscape, are the twin hills of Sitten. But the giant alps which fence in the Rhone valley of themselves hinder the varied prospect of mountain and plain and sea and island which meets us from the hill of Corinth. The lowlier English height really comes nearer, both in effect and in historic sentiment, to the central citadel of Hellas. If the Sugarloaf, as we prosaically call it--the Pen-y-val of its own people--which so proudly guards the entrance to the Usk valley, had the castle and church of Abergavenny on its summit instead of at its foot, we should have a nearer approach than all to Akrokorinthos, though it would be Akrokorinthos without its seas. But without the seas there could be no Corinth, there could be no Hellas. The point where the Eastern and Western seas most nearly touch is in truth the centre, the key-stone as the poet puts it, of the whole peninsular land south of Olympos. From the citadel of Corinth, if all Hellas does not itself lie within our sight, yet all Hellas lies within sight, as it were, by representation. Peloponnêsos and Attica, the land north and south of the gulf, the shores of the two great confederacies, the mountains of Arkadia and of Phôkis, and the snowy head of Aitolian Korax, stand there as if to speak of the lands north and south of them. And if the Western islands, once the special scene of Corinthian enterprise and Corinthian dominion, are beyond our sight, we may pass on to them in thought along the gulf over which the triremes of Corinth were rowed to their first sea-fight with revolted Korkyra. The eastern sea opens to the right, and the curved shore of Salamis speaks of the nobler warfare where Corinth joined with Athens and with Aigina to beat back the invading lord of Asia. At some favourable moment the eye may even catch the pillared steep of the akropolis of Athens, that Athens which Corinth once hoped to see turned into a sheep-walk, but whose help she was so soon to crave against the very Sparta which held back her destroying hand. From that height the Isthmus seems but a flat plain between the two seas--the Isthmus so often fortified, so often stormed by successive invaders. By that narrow neck Agêsilaos