This was even more strikingly the case in a visit to Parnassus and Delphi, where they spent some ten days in the hut of a poor cottager, and were richly compensated for their disappointment at finding no traces of the old temple, and no remains worthy of notice, by the extraordinary beauty of the country, and the opportunity which it gave them for countless sketches. They even offered a reward from the minaret of the village for one of the great vultures of the mountain, and obtained, for sketching purposes, a magnificent bird, measuring nine feet from tip to tip of his wings. “I drank,” he says, “deeply of the Castalian spring, but did not find my poetic faculty improved thereby.” Yet the _genius loci_ did not fail him entirely. It was here more especially that a change and growth of artistic power in him struck his fellow-travellers.[9] Before he left Rome, his drawings had been only careful and elaborate; now there began to show itself in them that indescribable power of insight and imagination, which distinguishes the true artist from the mere draughtsman. Conventionalities were shaken off, and nature represented as it was; laboured and ineffective drawing gave place to a bold and masterly grasp of the leading lines, and the general effect of the scene represented; and his journals show an ever-increasing admiration for natural and artificial beauty, and an absorbing delight in the task of representing it. The progress, once begun, never ceased. Every day witnessed a progress in his power, till his sketches in Egypt showed those powers in full maturity, and astonished those who had known him only in Italy and in Greece. At Athens they stayed about a month, in despite of some danger of plague which hung over the city. Here unfortunately his journals fail us for a time, and there is no means of supplying the deficiency. It is easy to imagine his intense delight in seeing the buildings which he had so long considered not only as the masterpieces of Greek art, but as the highest forms in which the architectural idea of beauty had clothed itself. We know, what might easily have been conceived, that his admiration did not evaporate in mere enthusiasm, but gave rise to careful study and thoughtful criticism; and that such study, while it deepened his original admiration, yet led him to feel that changes of circumstances, needs, and conceptions might well limit that imitation of Greek models, which had hitherto exercised a despotic influence over modern architecture. But beyond this, there is no memorial of what he perhaps at that time felt to be the crowning pleasure of his architectural tour, except some sketches, made always entirely on the spot, and remarkable for uniting great accuracy and truthfulness of effect to free and spirited drawing.