Mr. Taylor made the most of his winter in Greece, and visited every place of ancient renown which was accessible to travellers. He scarcely waited for the dawn of his first day in Athens before he hastened to the Acropolis, and admired its marvels and historical suggestions. At the Propylæa, which crowns the mountain with beauty and majesty, where all the destructive inventions of two thousand years have failed to annihilate the monument which Phidias and Calicrates erected to their genius, Mr. Taylor was overwhelmed with emotions, and gazed with wonder at the chaste sculpture which adorns the most graceful structure ever made of marble, and in silent awe contemplated the pillars, cornices, tablets, pavements, and broken ornaments with which he was surrounded. Where was the Coliseum he had praised so much when a boy? Where were the cathedrals, palaces, and castles he had regarded as so sublime? Everything he had seen sank into insignificance beside the ponderous yet exquisitely beautiful pile before him. He was so affected, that when he spoke he whispered, as if in the presence of Jupiter, and his eyes grew moist as he tried to compass the grandeur of the lofty Parthenon and Propylæa. This language will seem extravagant to the reader who has not felt such sensations. The writer, who makes no pretensions of being a poet either in letters or by nature, has been so filled with the unspeakable grandeur of some of the scenes from the heights of the Alps, Himalayas, and Rocky Mountains, as to find himself, to his own surprise, shedding copious streams of tears. It is a sensation unknown to common experience, and our language has no adequate terms with which to describe it. Such a feeling, beyond a doubt, was that which reigned in his sensitive nature when he stood in the porch of the Parthenon. To him, those marvels of art produced the impression which nothing but the mightiest mountain-peaks could awaken in others. It must have been grand to possess such a nature; and it is grand to follow him through his letters and books. There was the crowning point of all his travel. It had been reserved until near the end of his wanderings, and a fitting climax it was. The poet and traveller amid the ruins of Athens! He spent many happy hours amid the crumbling evidences of Athenian greatness. Temples uncounted lay half-buried in the broken soil. Those of Demeter, Hercules, Apollo, Aphrodite, Hephæstus, Theseus, Dioscuri, could be traced in the earth, or confronted the antiquarian with majestic porches; while the Odeon, Gymnasium, Museum, Aglaurium, Lyceum, Prytanæum, Erechtheum, Propylæa, and Parthenon, can easily be reconstructed in the imagination of any student of Greek history with the aid of their wonderful ruins. And when those colossal edifices stand forth in their beauty, it is but a step to the sublimest dreams, wherein Socrates, Anaxagoras, Pericles, Eschylus, Sophocles, Ictinus, Mnesicles, and their noble cotemporaries,