We walked out into the grass-grown, fragment-strewn court beyond the Parthenon.  It startled us, every now and then, to see a stony white face stare suddenly up at us out of the grass with its dead eyes.  The place seemed alive with ghosts.  I half expected to see the Athenian heroes of twenty centuries ago glide out of the shadows and steal into the old temple they knew so well and regarded with such boundless pride.

The full moon was riding high in the cloudless heavens, now.  We sauntered carelessly and unthinkingly to the edge of the lofty battlements of the citadel, and looked down—­a vision!  And such a vision!  Athens by moonlight!  The prophet that thought the splendors of the New Jerusalem were revealed to him, surely saw this instead!  It lay in the level plain right under our feet—­all spread abroad like a picture—­and we looked down upon it as we might have looked from a balloon.  We saw no semblance of a street, but every house, every window, every clinging vine, every projection was as distinct and sharply marked as if the time were noon-day; and yet there was no glare, no glitter, nothing harsh or repulsive—­the noiseless city was flooded with the mellowest light that ever streamed from the moon, and seemed like some living creature wrapped in peaceful slumber.  On its further side was a little temple, whose delicate pillars and ornate front glowed with a rich lustre that chained the eye like a spell; and nearer by, the palace of the king reared its creamy walls out of the midst of a great garden of shrubbery that was flecked all over with a random shower of amber lights —­a spray of golden sparks that lost their brightness in the glory of the moon, and glinted softly upon the sea of dark foliage like the pallid stars of the milky-way.  Overhead the stately columns, majestic still in their ruin—­under foot the dreaming city—­in the distance the silver sea —­not on the broad earth is there an other picture half so beautiful!

As we turned and moved again through the temple, I wished that the illustrious men who had sat in it in the remote ages could visit it again and reveal themselves to our curious eyes—­Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Socrates, Phocion, Pythagoras, Euclid, Pindar, Xenophon, Herodotus, Praxiteles and Phidias, Zeuxis the painter.  What a constellation of celebrated names!  But more than all, I wished that old Diogenes, groping so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously for one solitary honest man in all the world, might meander along and stumble on our party.  I ought not to say it, may be, but still I suppose he would have put out his light.