Greece is considerate.  I have seen landscapes so continuously and overpoweringly beautiful that they bored me.  I know how to sympatize with Alfred Vargrave when he says to the Duc de Luvois: 

 “Nature is here too pretentious; her mien
  Is too haughty.  One likes to be coaxed, not compelled,
  To the notice such beauty resents if withheld. 
  She seems to be saying too plainly, ‘Admire me;’
  And I answer, ‘Yes, madam, I do; but you tire me.’”

Not so with Greece, for when you become almost intoxicated with her wonderful blues and greens and purples, and you move your head restlessly and beg a breathing-space, she compassionately recognizes your mood and lowers a silver veil over her brilliant beauty, so that you see her through a gauzy mist, which presently tantalizes you into blinking your tired eyes and wondering what she is so deftly concealing.  It is like the feeling which assails you when you see a veiled statue.  You long for the sculptor to chisel away the marble gauze and reveal the features.  And when the craving becomes intolerable, lo!  Greece, the past mistress of the art of beauty, grants your desire, and with the regal gift of a goddess brings your soul into its fruition.  Cleopatra would have tantalized and left your heart to eat itself out in hopeless longing.  But Cleopatra was only a queen; Venus was a goddess.

Names which were but names to you before become living realities now.  We are crossing the Attic plain, and from that we find ourselves in the Thracian plain.  What girl has not heard her brother spout concerning these names, famous in Greek history?  Then we are in Megara, on the lovely blue Bay of Salamis.  From Megara the Bay of Salamis becomes Saronic Gulf, and after an hour or two of its unspeakable beauty we cross over to Corinth and find, if possible, that the blues of the Gulf of Corinth are even more sapphire, that its purples are even more amethyst, that its greens are more emerald than the blues and purples and greens of Salamis.

From Corinth the road skirts the sea, and all these white plains are devoted to the drying of currants.  At Sikyon, called “cucumber town,” but originally, with the mystic beauty of the ancient Greeks, called “poppy town,” the American school at Athens has made some wonderful excavations.  It has discovered the supports of the stage of the famous theatre there.  Then, still with the sea before us, we are at Aegium, a name full of memories of ancient Greece.  It has olive, currant, grape, and mulberry plantations, and lies shrouded and bedded in beauty and romance.  There, over a high iron bridge, we cross a rushing mountain torrent and are at Patras, in the moonlight, with our big ship waiting to take us across the Adriatic Sea to Brindisi.