The learning of the philosophers of Greece; the “plain living and high thinking” they taught; the unspeakable purity of her art; the ineffable manner in which her masters reproduced the idea of the stern, cold pride of aloofness in these sublime types of perfect men, wrung my heart with a sense of personal loss.  I can imagine that Pygmalion felt about Galatea as I felt that first hour in the Acropolis.  I can imagine that a woman who had loved with the passion of her life a man of matchless integrity, of superb pride, of lofty ideals, and who had lost that love irretrievably through a fault of her own, whose gravity she first saw through his eyes when it was too late, might have felt as I felt in that hour.  All the agony of a hopeless love for an art which never can return; all the sense of personal loss for the purity which I was completely realizing for the first time when it was too late; all the intense longing to have the dead past live again, that I might prove myself more worthy of it, assailed me with as mighty a force as ever the human heart could experience and still continue to beat.  The piteous fragments of this lost art which remained—­a few columns, the remnants of an immortal frieze, the long lines of drapery from which the head and figure were gone, the cold brow of the Hermes, the purity of his profile, the proud curve of his lips, the ineffable wanness of his smile—­I could have cast myself at the foot of the Parthenon and wept over the personal disaster which befell me in that hour of realization.

I never again wish to go through such an agony of emotion.  The Acropolis made the whole of Europe seem tawdry.  I felt ashamed of the gorgeous sights I had seen, of the rich dinners I had eaten, of the luxuries I had enjoyed.  I felt as if I would like to have the whole of my past life fall away from me as a cast-off garment, and that if I could only begin over I could do so much better with my life.  I could have knelt and beat my hands together in a wild, impotent prayer for the past to be given into my keeping for just one more trial, one more opportunity to live up to the beauty and holiness and purity I had missed.  When I looked up and saw the naked columns of the Parthenon silhouetted against the sky, bereft of their capitals, ragged, scarred, battered with the war of wind and weather and countless ages, all about me the ruins seemed to say, “Your appreciation is in vain; it is too late, too late!”

I have an indistinct recollection of stumbling into the carriage, of driving down a steep road, of having the Pentelikon pointed out to me, of knowing that near that mountain lay Marathon, of seeing the statue of “Greece crowning Byron,” but I heard with unhearing ears, I saw with unseeing eyes.  I had left my heart and all my senses in the Acropolis.  I believe that one who had left her loved one in the churchyard, on the way home for the first time to her empty house, has felt that dazed, unrealizing yet dumb heartache that I felt for days after leaving the Parthenon.