varied genius would acquire over all hearts, alike to elevate or depress, to darken or illuminate them,—­and then place, on the other side, all the penalties of this gift, the waste and wear of the heart through the imagination, the havoc of that perpetual fire within, which, while it dazzles others, consumes the possessor,—­the invidiousness of such an elevation in the eyes of mankind, and the revenge they take on him who compels them to look up to it,—­would he, it may be asked, have welcomed glory on such conditions? would he not rather have felt that the purchase was too costly, and that such warfare with an ungrateful world, while living, would be ill recompensed even by the immortality it might award him afterwards?

At Missolonghi he dismissed his whole band of Albanians, with the exception of one, named Dervish, whom he took into his service, and who, with Basilius, the attendant allotted him by Ali Pacha, continued with him during the remainder of his stay in the East.  After a residence of near a fortnight at Patras, he next directed his course to Vostizza,—­on approaching which town the snowy peak of Parnassus, towering on the other side of the Gulf, first broke on his eyes; and in two days after, among the sacred hollows of Delphi, the stanzas, with which that vision had inspired him, were written.[132]

It was at this time, that, in riding along the sides of Parnassus, he saw an unusually large flight of eagles in the air,—­a phenomenon which seems to have affected his imagination with a sort of poetical superstition, as he, more than once, recurs to the circumstance in his journals.  Thus, “Going to the fountain of Delphi (Castri) in 1809, I saw a flight of twelve eagles (H. says they were vultures—­at least in conversation), and I seised the omen.  On the day before I composed the lines to Parnassus (in Childe Harold), and, on beholding the birds, had a hope that Apollo had accepted my homage.  I have at least had the name and fame of a poet during the poetical part of life (from twenty to thirty);—­whether it will last is another matter.”

He has also, in reference to this journey from Patras, related a little anecdote of his own sportsmanship, which, by all but sportsmen, will be thought creditable to his humanity.  “The last bird I ever fired at was an eaglet, on the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto, near Vostizza.  It was only wounded, and I tried to save it,—­the eye was so bright.  But it pined, and died in a few days; and I never did since, and never will, attempt the death of another bird.”

To a traveller in Greece, there are few things more remarkable than the diminutive extent of those countries, which have filled such a wide space in fame.  “A man might very easily,” says Mr. Hobhouse, “at a moderate pace ride from Livadia to Thebes and back again between breakfast and dinner; and the tour of all Boeotia might certainly be made in two days without baggage.”  Having visited, within a very short space of time, the fountains of Memory and Oblivion at Livadia, and the haunts of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes, the travellers at length turned towards Athens, the city of their dreams, and, after crossing Mount Cithaeron, arrived in sight of the ruins of Phyle, on the evening of Christmas-day, 1809.