The full moon was riding high in the cloudless heavens now. We sauntered
carelessly and unthinkingly to the edge of the lofty battlements of the
citadel, and looked down—a vision! And such a vision! Athens by
moonlight! The prophet that thought the splendors of the New Jerusalem
were revealed to him, surely saw this instead! It lay in the level plain
right under our feet—all spread abroad like a picture—and we looked down
upon it as we might have looked from a balloon. We saw no semblance of a
street, but every house, every window, every clinging vine, every
projection, was as distinct and sharply marked as if the time were
noonday; and yet there was no glare, no glitter, nothing harsh or
repulsive—the noiseless city was flooded with the mellowest light that
ever streamed from the moon, and seemed like some living creature
wrapped in peaceful slumber. On its further side was a little temple,
whose delicate pillars and ornate front glowed with a rich luster that
chained the eye like the spell; and nearer by, the palace of the king
reared its creamy walls out of the midst of a great garden of shrubbery
that was flecked all over with a random shower of amber lights—a spray
of golden sparks that lost their brightness in the glory of the moon,
and glinted softly upon the sea of dark foliage like the pallid stars of
the milky way. Overhead the stately columns, majestic still in their
ruin—under foot the dreaming city—in the distance the silver sea—not on
the broad earth is there another picture half so beautiful!
As we turned and moved again through the temple, I wished that the
illustrious men who had sat in it in the remote ages could visit it
again and reveal themselves to our curious eyes—Plato, Aristotle,
Demosthenes, Socrates, Phocion, Pythagoras, Euclid, Pindar, Xenophon,
Herodotus, Praxiteles and Phidias, Zeuxis the painter. What a
constellation of celebrated names! But more than all, I wished that old
Diogenes, groping so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously
for one solitary honest man in all the world, might meander along and
stumble on our party. I ought not to say it, maybe, but still I suppose
he would have put out his light.