For this just then was my pagan soul’s desire—­that (not forfeiting my inheritance for the life to come) it had yet been given me to live through this world—­to live a favoured mortal under the old Olympian dispensation—­to speak out my resolves to the listening Jove, and hear him answer with approving thunder—­to be blessed with divine counsels from the lips of Pallas Athenie—­to believe—­ ay, only to believe—­to believe for one rapturous moment that in the gloomy depths of the grove, by the mountain’s side, there were some leafy pathway that crisped beneath the glowing sandal of Aphrodetie—­Aphrodetie, not coldly disdainful of even a mortal’s love!  And this vain, heathenish longing of mine was father to the thought of visiting the scene of the ancient worship.

The isle is beautiful.  From the edge of the rich, flowery fields on which I trod to the midway sides of the snowy Olympus, the ground could only here and there show an abrupt crag, or a high straggling ridge that up-shouldered itself from out of the wilderness of myrtles, and of the thousand bright-leaved shrubs that twined their arms together in lovesome tangles.  The air that came to my lips was warm and fragrant as the ambrosial breath of the goddess, infecting me, not (of course) with a faith in the old religion of the isle, but with a sense and apprehension of its mystic power—­a power that was still to be obeyed—­obeyed by me, for why otherwise did I toil on with sorry horses to “where, for her, the hundred altars glowed with Arabian incense, and breathed with the fragrance of garlands ever fresh”? {13}

I passed a sadly disenchanting night in the cabin of a Greek priest—­not a priest of the goddess, but of the Greek Church; there was but one humble room, or rather shed, for man, and priest, and beast.  The next morning I reached Baffa (Paphos), a village not far distant from the site of the temple.  There was a Greek husbandman there who (not for emolument, but for the sake of the protection and dignity which it afforded) had got leave from the man at Limasol to hoist his flag as a sort of deputy-provisionary-sub-vice-pro-acting-consul of the British sovereign:  the poor fellow instantly changed his Greek headgear for the cap of consular dignity, and insisted upon accompanying me to the ruins.  I would not have stood this if I could have felt the faintest gleam of my yesterday’s pagan piety, but I had ceased to dream, and had nothing to dread from any new disenchanters.

The ruins (the fragments of one or two prostrate pillars) lie upon a promontory, bare and unmystified by the gloom of surrounding groves.  My Greek friend in his consular cap stood by, respectfully waiting to see what turn my madness would take, now that I had come at last into the presence of the old stones.  If you have no taste for research, and can’t affect to look for inscriptions, there is some awkwardness in coming to the end of a merely sentimental pilgrimage;