Though the poet has left, in his own verses, an ever-during testimony of the enthusiasm with which he now contemplated the scenes around him, it is not difficult to conceive that, to superficial observers, Lord Byron at Athens might have appeared an untouched spectator of much that throws ordinary travellers into, at least, verbal raptures.  For pretenders of every sort, whether in taste or morals, he entertained, at all times, the most profound contempt; and if, frequently, his real feelings of admiration disguised themselves under an affected tone of indifference and mockery, it was out of pure hostility to the cant of those, who, he well knew, praised without any feeling at all.  It must be owned, too, that while he thus justly despised the raptures of the common herd of travellers, there were some pursuits, even of the intelligent and tasteful, in which he took but very little interest.  With the antiquarian and connoisseur his sympathies were few and feeble:—­“I am not a collector,” he says, in one of his notes on Childe Harold, “nor an admirer of collections.”  For antiquities, indeed, unassociated with high names and deeds, he had no value whatever; and of works of art he was content to admire the general effect, without professing, or aiming at, any knowledge of the details.  It was to nature, in her lonely scenes of grandeur and beauty, or as at Athens, shining, unchanged, among the ruins of glory and of art, that the true fervid homage of his whole soul was paid.  In the few notices of his travels, appended to Childe Harold, we find the sites and scenery of the different places he visited far more fondly dwelt upon than their classic or historical associations.  To the valley of Zitza he reverts, both in prose and verse, with a much warmer recollection than to Delphi or the Troad; and the plain of Athens itself is chiefly praised by him as “a more glorious prospect than even Cintra or Istambol.”  Where, indeed, could Nature assert such claims to his worship as in scenes like these, where he beheld her blooming, in indestructible beauty, amid the wreck of all that man deems most worthy of duration?  “Human institutions,” says Harris, “perish, but Nature is permanent:”—­or, as Lord Byron has amplified this thought[133] in one of his most splendid passages:—­

      “Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
      Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
      Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
      And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;
      There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
      The free-born wanderer of thy mountain-air;
      Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
      Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;
    Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.”

    CHILDE HAROLD, Canto II.