DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.4593#0144
THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 125
rivalry of pagan devotion, or because something of
the old pagan mystery or nature love was preserved
in Greek Christianity that a Byzantine chapel with its
painted saints was set in this hollow of the rock, as
on the south-side grotto of the Acropolis a votive
lamp is kept burning for an obscure Christian saint?
Like the water from this celebrated spring, the old is
perpetually bubbling up into the new; Christianity
still feeds its baptismal fonts from pagan springs.
It is time to go down from the consecrated rock.
Greece is more than Athens and Athens is more than
the Acropolis. But how much of Greece, the old and
the new, is here! Where can one find so large a
panorama of history painted on so small a canvas?
The mountains, the isles and the sea have their story
to tell, and the sun will set for you to-day with as
much beauty as it set for Pericles, but it will light up
for you a picture that Pericles could not see. You
can look down the long vista of Greek life. You
can see the birth and growth of a religion. It takes
refuge in the rocks and groves and streams; its ex-
panding life struggles to utter itself in forms of beauty
and grandeur. How rude and pitiful its first efforts !
It shapes the clay into conventional moulds. But its
genius finds new liberation, and with grace, beauty
and rising apostrophes of form and color wrought in
snowy marble, incarnates its vision of Eternal Beauty.
If you look at these melodies of curve with the eye
only, you will miss half their significance. To us they
are studies in artistic form and feeling; to those who
wrought them they were a part of their religion.
Again, you may see the drama of history and life
rivalry of pagan devotion, or because something of
the old pagan mystery or nature love was preserved
in Greek Christianity that a Byzantine chapel with its
painted saints was set in this hollow of the rock, as
on the south-side grotto of the Acropolis a votive
lamp is kept burning for an obscure Christian saint?
Like the water from this celebrated spring, the old is
perpetually bubbling up into the new; Christianity
still feeds its baptismal fonts from pagan springs.
It is time to go down from the consecrated rock.
Greece is more than Athens and Athens is more than
the Acropolis. But how much of Greece, the old and
the new, is here! Where can one find so large a
panorama of history painted on so small a canvas?
The mountains, the isles and the sea have their story
to tell, and the sun will set for you to-day with as
much beauty as it set for Pericles, but it will light up
for you a picture that Pericles could not see. You
can look down the long vista of Greek life. You
can see the birth and growth of a religion. It takes
refuge in the rocks and groves and streams; its ex-
panding life struggles to utter itself in forms of beauty
and grandeur. How rude and pitiful its first efforts !
It shapes the clay into conventional moulds. But its
genius finds new liberation, and with grace, beauty
and rising apostrophes of form and color wrought in
snowy marble, incarnates its vision of Eternal Beauty.
If you look at these melodies of curve with the eye
only, you will miss half their significance. To us they
are studies in artistic form and feeling; to those who
wrought them they were a part of their religion.
Again, you may see the drama of history and life