University of Virginia Library

83. LETTER LXXXIII.

Island of Egina. — The “Maid of Athens,” in the
very teeth of poetry, has become Mrs. Black of Egina!
The beautiful Teresa Makri, of whom Byron asked
back his heart, of whom Moore and Hobhouse, and

the poet himself have written so much and so passionately,
has forgotten the sweet burthen of the sweetest
of love songs, and taken the unromantic name,
and followed the unromantic fortunes, of a Scotchman!

The commodore proposed that we should call upon
her on our way to the temple of Jupiter, this morning.
We pulled up to the town in the barge, and landed on
the handsome pier built by Dr. Howe (who expended
thus, most judiciously, a part of the provisions sent
from our country in his charge), and, finding a Greek
in the crowd, who understood a little Italian, we were
soon on our way to Mrs. Black's. Our guide was a
fine, grave-looking man of forty, with a small cockade
on his red cap, which indicated that he was some
way in the service of the government. He laid his
hand on his heart, when I asked him if he had
known any Americans in Egina. “They built this,”
said he, pointing to the pier, the handsome granite
posts of which we were passing at the moment. “They
gave us bread, and meat, and clothing, when we should
otherwise have perished.” It was said with a look
and tone that thrilled me. I felt as if the whole
debt of sympathy which Greece owes our country,
were repaid by this one energetic expression of gratitude.

We stopped opposite a small gate, and the Greek
went in without cards. It was a small stone house of
a story and a half, with a rickety flight of wooden steps
at the side, and not a blade of grass or sign of a flower
in court or window. If there had been but a geranium
in the porch, or a rose-tree by the gate, for description's
sake.

Mr. Black was out — Mrs. Black was in. We walked
up the creaking steps, with a Scotch terrier barking
and snapping at our heels, and were met at the door
by, really, a very pretty woman. She smiled as I
apologized for our intrusion, and a sadder or a sweeter
smile I never saw. She said her welcome in a few,
simple words of Italian, and I thought there were few
sweeter voices in the world. I asked her if she had
not learned English yet. She colored, and said, “No,
signore!” and the deep spot in her cheek faded gradually
down, in teints a painter would remember. Her
husband, she said, had wished to learn her language,
and would never let her speak English. I began to
feel a prejudice against him. Presently, a boy of perhaps
three years, came into the room — an ugly, white-headed,
Scotch-looking little ruffian, thin-lipped and
freckled, and my aversion for Mr. Black became quite
decided. “Did you not regret leaving Athens?” I
asked. “Very much, signore,” she answered with
half a sigh; “but my husband dislikes Athens.”
Horrid Mr. Black! thought I.

I wished to ask her of Lord Byron, but I had heard
that the poet's admiration had occasioned the usual
scandal attendant on every kind of pre-eminence, and
her modest and timid manners, while they assured me
of her purity of heart, made me afraid to venture
where there was even a possibility of wounding her.
She sat in a drooping attitude on the coarsely-covered
divan, which occupied three sides of the little room,
and it was difficult to believe that any eye but her
husband's had ever looked upon her, or that the
“wells of her heart” had ever been drawn upon for
anything deeper than the simple duties of a wife and
mother.

She offered us some sweetmeats, the usual Greek
compliment to visiters, as we rose to go, and laying
her hand upon her heart, in the beautiful custom
of the country, requested me to express her thanks to
the commodore for the honor he had done her in calling,
and to wish him and his family every happiness.
A servant-girl, very shabbily dressed, stood at the side
door, and we offered her some money, which she
might have taken unnoticed. She drew herself up
very coldly, and refused it, as if she thought we had
quite mistaken her. In a country where gifts of the
kind are so universal, it spoke well for the pride of the
family, at least.

I turned after we had taken leave, and made an
apology to speak to her again; for, in the interest of
the general impression she had made upon me, I had
forgotten to notice her dress, and I was not sure that
I could remember a single feature of her face. We
had called unexpectedly of course, and her dress was
very plain. A red cloth cap bound about the temples,
with a colored shawl, whose folds were mingled with
large braids of dark brown hair, and decked with a
tassel of blue silk, which fell to her left shoulder,
formed her head-dress. In other respects she was
dressed like a European. She is a little above the
middle height, slightly and well formed, and walks
weakly, like most Greek women, as if her feet were
too small for her weight. Her skin is dark and clear,
and she has a color in her cheek and lips that looks to
me consumptive. Her teeth are white and regular,
her face oval, and her forehead and nose form the
straight line of the Grecian model — one of the few instances
I have ever seen of it. Her eyes are large,
and of a soft, liquid hazel, and this is her chief beauty.
There is that “looking out of the soul through them,”
which Byron always described as constituting the loveliness
that most moved him. I made up my mind, as
we walked away, that she would be a lovely woman
anywhere. Her horrid name, and the unprepossessing
circumstances in which we found her, had uncharmed,
I thought, all poetical delusion that would
naturally surround her as the “Maid of Athens.” We
met her as simple Mrs. Black, whose Scotch husband's
terrier had worried us at her door, and we left
her, feeling that the poetry which she had called forth
from the heart of Byron, was her due by every law of
loveliness.

From the house of the maid of Athens we walked
to the school of Capo d'Istrias. It is a spacious stone
quadrangle, enclosing a court handsomely railed and
gravelled, and furnished with gymnastic apparatus.
School was out, and perhaps a hundred and fifty
boys were playing in the area. An intelligent-looking
man accompanied us through the museum of antiquities,
where we saw nothing very much worth noticing,
after the collections of Rome, and to the library, where
there was a superb bust of Capo d'Istrias, done by a
Roman artist. It is a noble head, resembling Washington.

We bought a large basket of grapes for a few cents
in returning to the boat, and offered money to one or
two common men who had been of assistance to us,
but no one would receive it. I italicise the remark, because
the Greeks are so often stigmatized as utterly
mercenary.

We pulled along the shore, passing round the point
on which stands a single fluted column, the only remains
of a magnificent temple of Venus, and, getting
the wind, hoisted a sail, and ran down the northern
side of the island five or six miles, till we arrived opposite
the mountain on which stands the temple of
Jupiter Panhellenios. The view of it from the sea
was like that of a temple drawn on the sky. It occupies
the very peak of the mountain, and is seen many
miles on either side by the mariner of the Egean.

A couple of wild-looking, handsome fellows, bareheaded
and barelegged, with shirts and trowsers
reaching to the knee, lay in a small caique under
the shore; and, as we landed, the taller of the two
laid his hand on his breast, and offered to conduct
us to the temple. The ascent was about a mile.

We toiled over ploughed fields, with here and there
a cluster of fig-trees, wild patches of rock and brier,

and an occasional wall, and arrived breathless at the
top, where a cool wind met us from the other side of
the sea with delicious refreshment.

We sat down among the ruins of the oldest temple
of Greece after that of Corinth. Twenty-three noble
columns still lifted their heads over us, after braving
the tempests of more than two thousand years. The
ground about was piled up with magnificent fragments
of marble, preserving, even in their fall, the
sharp edges of the admirable sculpture of Greece.
The Doric capital, the simple frieze, the well-fitted
frustra, might almost be restored in the perfection
with which they were left by the last touch of the
chisel.

The view hence comprised a classic world. There
was Athens! The broad mountain over the intensely
blue gulf at our feet was Hymettus, and a bright white
summit as of a mound between it and the sea, glittering
brightly in the sun, was the venerable pile of temples
in the Acropolis. To the left, Corinth was distinguishable
over its low isthmus, and Megara and
Salamis, and following down the wavy line of the
mountains of Attica, the promontory of Sunium, modern
Cape Colonna, dropped the horizon upon the sea.
One might sit out his life amid these loftily-placed
ruins, and scarce exhaust in thought the human history
that has unrolled within the scope of his eye.

We passed two or three hours wandering about
among the broken columns, and gazing away to the
main and the distant isles, confessing the surpassing
beauty of Greece. Yet have its mountains scarce a
green spot, and its vales are treeless and uninhabited,
and all that constitutes desolation is there, and strange
as it may seem, you neither miss the verdure, nor the
people, nor find it desolate. The outline of Greece,
in the first place, is the finest in the world. The
mountains lean down into the valleys, and the plains
swell up to the mountains, and the islands rise from
the sea, with a mixture of boldness and grace altogether
peculiar. In the most lonely parts of the
Egean, where you can see no trace of a human foot,
it strikes you like a foreign land. Then the atmosphere
is its own, and it exceeds that of Italy, far. It
gives it the look of a landscape seen through a faintly-teinted
glass. Soft blue mists of the most rarefied and
changing shapes envelop the mountains on the clearest
day, and without obscuring the most distant points
perceptibly, give hill and vale a beauty that surpasses
that of verdure. I never saw such air as I see in
Greece. It has the same effect on the herbless and
rocky scenery about us, as a veil over the face of a
woman.

The islander who had accompanied us to the temple,
stood on a fragment of a column, still as a statue
looking down upon the sea toward Athens. His figure
for athletic grace of mould, and his head and features,
for the expression of manly beauty and character,
might have been models to Phidias. The beautiful
and poetical land, of which he inherited his share
of unparalleled glory, lay around him. I asked myself
why it should have become, as it seems to be, the despair
of the philanthropist. Why should its people,
who, in the opinion of Child Harold, are “nature's favorites
still,” be branded and abandoned as irreclaimable
rogues, and the source to which we owe, even to
this day, our highest models of taste, be neglected and
forgotten? The nine days' enthusiasm for Greece
has died away, and she has received a king from a
family of despots. But there seems to me in her very
beauty, and in the still superior qualities of her children,
wherever they have room for competition, a
promise of resuscitation. The convulsions of Europe
may leave her soon to herself, and the slipper of the
Turk, and the hand of the Christian, once lifted fairly
from her neck, she will rise, and stand up amid these
imperishable temples, once more free!