At Corinth he had a startling experience in an earthquake, feeling the earth rise and fall with that sickening movement, creating a nausea like the sea-sickness of a whole voyage concentrated into a few minutes, and saw the stone walls of the house crumbling and splitting about him. He arrived after the greatest shock had passed, or he would have seen whole streets of buildings thrown down, for the village was half in ruins when he reached the place. Near Corinth he saw the plain whereon were celebrated the Isthmian games and repeated sections of Schiller’s poem, “The Gods of Greece.”
At Argolis he saw the gateway of Mycenæ, guarded by the celebrated stone lions, and tried to connect Agamemnon and Orestes with the landscapes.
At Sparta he trod the sward above the buried palaces, and having no poets’ names to rhyme with Lycurgus and Leonidas, he hurried on to scenes less suggestive of mere physical endurance and bloody encounters.
In Mania, within the boundaries of ancient Sparta, he was delighted to find the descendants of the ancient Greeks, whose blood was not diluted by that of Turks, Slavs, Italians, and Egyptians. He found there what no other part of Greece visited by him could boast, the Greek face and form such as Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus portrayed in their immortal sculptures. At Olympia he saw the home of Xenophon, and the foundations of that temple of Olympus from whence the Greek chronology was taken, near which were celebrated the great Olympian Games, around which were once those sacred groves so often mentioned in Greek poetry and tragedy, and where the most artistic work of Phidias stood,—the ivory statue of Jupiter.
At Thebes he recalled the deeds of Pindar, Epaminondas, and the heroes of the Trojan War.
At Delphi he looked over the forests that clothe the lofty Parnassus, gazed into the rocky cleft from which the priestesses received their communications, and saw the sites of temples used for gardens, and blocks from the sacred shrines used for cellar walls.
At Thermopylæ he marked the spot where the heroes fought and the narrow gorge where they fell, with feelings of respect and pride. He said that the story of such deeds should never be allowed to die.