Bette: Our Trip

London & Greece with Molly & Alexander

London

Greece

Athens | Peloponnese | Visiting Relatives

Cousins

Athens arose: a city such as vision
  Builds from the purple crags and silver towers
Of battlemented cloud, as in derision
  Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors
Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it;
  Its portals are inhabited
  By thunder-zoned winds, each head
Within its cloudy wings with sun-fire garlanded,--
  A divine work! Athens, diviner yet,
  Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will
Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set;
  For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill
Peopled, with forms that mock the eternal dead
  In marble immortality, that hill
  Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle.

   --P. B. Shelley, "Ode to Liberty"

Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground;
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
And all the Muse's tales seem truly told,
Till the sense aches with gazing to behold
The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon;
Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold
Defies the power which crush'd thy temples gone:
Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

"Taken with" Athens

O Attic Shape! Fair attitude! With brede
  Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
  Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
  When old age shall this generation waste,
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
  'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

John Keats, from Ode on a Grecian Urn