WITH deep reluctance we tore ourselves from the fascinations of Athens very early one morning. After these things, says the Christian's guide, Paul departed from Athens and came to Corinth. Our departure was in the same direction. We had no choice of time, for the only steamer leaves on Sunday morning, and, besides, our going then removed us from the temptation of the Olympic games. At half past five we were on board the little Greek steamer at the Piraeus.
We sailed along Salamis. It was a morning of clouds; but 苂ina (once mistress of these seas, and the hated rival of Athens) and the Peloponnesus were robed in graceful garments that, like the veils of the Circassian girls, did not conceal their forms. In four hours we landed at Kalamaki, which is merely a station for the transfer of passengers across the Isthmus. Six miles south on the coast we had a glimpse of Cenchre?, which is famous as the place where Paul, still under the bonds of Jewish superstition, having accomplished his vow, shaved his head. The neck of limestone rock, which connects the Peloponnesus with the mainland, is ten miles long, and not more than four miles broad from Kalamaki to Lutraki on the Gulf of Corinth, and as it is not, at its highest elevation, over a hundred feet above the sea, the project of piercing it with a canal, which was often entertained and actually begun by Nero, does not seem preposterous. The traveller over it to-day will see some remains of the line of fortification, the Isthmian Wall, which served in turn Greeks, Macedonians, Saracens, Latin Crusaders, and Slavonic settlers; and fragments of the ancient buildings of the Isthmian Sanctuary, where the Panhellenic festivals were celebrated.
The drive across was exceedingly pleasant. The Isthmus is seamed with ravines and ridges, picturesque with rocks which running vines drape and age has colored, and variegated with corn-fields. We enjoyed on either hand the splendid mountain forms; on the north white Helicon and Parnassus; on the south the nearly two-thousand-feet wall-crowned height of Acro-Corinth and the broken snowy hills of the Morea.
Familiar as we were with the atlas, we had not until now any adequate conception how much indented the Grecian mainland and islands are, nor how broken into peaks, narrow valleys, and long serrated summits are the contours. When we appreciate, by actual sight, the multitude of islands that compose Greece, how subject to tempests its seas are, how difficult is communication between the villages of the mainland, or even those on the same island, we understand the naturalness of the ancient divisions and strifes; and we see the physical obstacles to the creation of a feeling of unity in the present callow kingdom. And one hears with no surprise that Corfu wishes herself back under English protection.
We drove through the cluster of white houses on the bay, which is now called Corinth, and saw at three miles' distance the site of the old city and the Acropolis beyond it. Earthquakes and malaria have not been more lenient to the ancient town than was Roman vengeance, and of the capital which was to Greece in luxury what Athens was in wit, only a few columns and sinking walls remain. Even the voluptuousness of Corinth is a tale of two thousand years ago, and the name might long ago have sunk with the fortunes of the city, but for the long residence there of a poor tent-maker, in whom no proud citizen of that day, of all those who "sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play," would have recognized the chief creator of its fame.
Our little Greek steamer was crowded excessively, and mainly with Greeks going to Patras and Zante, who noisily talked politics and business in a manner that savored more of New England than of the land of Solon and Plato. For the first time in a travel of many months we met families together, gentlemen with their wives and children, and saw the evidences of a happy home-life. It is everything in favor of the Greeks that they have preserved the idea of home, and cherish, as the centre of all good and strength, domestic purity.
At dinner there was an undisguised rush for seats at the table, and the strongest men got them. We looked down through the skylights and beheld the valiant Greeks flourishing their knives, attacking, while expecting soup, the caviare and pickles, and thrusting the naked blades into their mouths without fear. The knife seems seldom to hurt the Greek, whose display of deadly weapons is mainly for show. There are dozens of stout swarthy fellows on board, in petticoats and quilted leggings, with each a belly full of weapons,—the protruding leathern pouch contains a couple of pistols, a cheese-knife, cartridges, and pipes and tobacco.
The sail through the Gulf of Corinth is one to be enjoyed and remembered, but the reader shall not be wearied with a catalogue of names. What is it to him that we felt the presence of Delphi, that we had Parnassus on our right, and Mt. Panachaicum, lifting itself higher than Mt. Washington, on our left, the Locrian coast on one side, and the range of Arcadia on the other? The strait narrowed as we came at evening near Patras, and between the opposite forts of Rheum and Antirheum it is no broader than the Bosphorus; it was already dusky when we peered into the Bay of Lepanto, which is not, however, the site of the battle of that name in which the natural son of the pretty innkeeper of Ratisbon rendered such a signal service to Christendom. Patras, a thriving new city, which inherits the name but not the site of the ancient, lies open in the narrow strait, subject to the high wind which always blows through the passage, and is usually a dangerous landing. All the time that we lay there in the dark we thought a tempest was prevailing, but the clamor subsided when we moved into the open sea. Of Patras we saw nothing except a circle of lights on the shore a mile long, a procession of colored torches which illumined for an instant the fa鏰de of the city hall, and some rockets which went up in honor of a local patriot who had returned on our boat from Athens. And we had not even a glimpse of Missolonghi, which we passed in the night.
At daylight we are at Zante, anchored in its eastward-looking harbor opposite the Peloponnesian coast. The town is most charmingly situated, and gives one an impression of wealth and elegance. Old Zacynthus was renowned for its hospitality before the days of the Athenian and Spartan wars, and—such is the tenacity with which traits are perpetuated amid a thousand changes—its present wealthy and enterprising merchant-farmers, whose villas are scattered about the slopes, enjoy a reputation for the same delightful gift. The gentlemen are distinguished among the Ionians for their fondness of country life and convivial gayety. Early as it was, the town welcomed us with its most gracious offerings of flowers and fruit; for the pedlers who swarmed on board brought nothing less poetical than handfuls of dewy roses, carnations, heliotrope, freshly cut mignonette, baskets of yellow oranges, and bottles of red wine. The wine, of which the Zante passengers had boasted, was very good, and the oranges, solid, juicy, sweet, the best I have ever eaten, except, perhaps, some grown in a fortunate year in Florida. Sharp hills rise behind the town, and, beyond, a most fertile valley broadens out to the sea. Almost all the land is given up to the culture of the currant-vine, the grapes of Corinth, for in the transfer of the chief cultivation of this profitable fruit from Corinth to Zante, the name went with the dwarf vines. On the hillsides, as we sailed away, we observed innumerable terraces, broad, flat, and hard like threshing-floors, and learned that they were the drying-grounds of the ripe currants.
We were all day among the Ionian Islands, and were able to see all of them except Cythera, off Cape Malea, esteemed for its honey and its magnificent temple to the foam-born Venus. They lay in such a light as the reader of Homer likes to think of them. We sailed past them as in a dream, not caring to distinguish history from fable. It was off the little Echinades, near the coast, by the mouth of the Achelous, that Don John, three hundred years ago, broke the European onset of the Ottoman arms; it was nearly a dear victory for Christendom, for among the severely wounded was Cervantes, and Don Quixote had not yet been written. But this battle is not more real to us than the story of Ulysses and Penelope which the rocky surface of Ithaca recalls. And as we lingered along the shores of Cephalonia and Leucadia, it was not of any C鎠ar or Byzantine emperor or Norman chieftain that we thought, but of the poet whose verses will outlast all their renown. Leucadia still harbors, it is said, the breed of wolves that, perhaps, of all the inhabitants of these islands preserve in purity the Hellenic blood. We sailed close to the long promontory, "Leucadia's far-projecting rock of woe," and saw, if any one may see, the very precipice from which Sappho, leaping, quenched in brine the amatory flames of a heart that sixty years of song and trouble had not cooled.
Through the strait of Actium we looked upon the s............