Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1865. Excerpt:... CHAPTER IV. OLTMPIA. Mat 22.--The morning was soft and mellow, now and then a sort of shivering brightness shining on the prodigal profusion of evergreens which lined our road. When we had got on horseback, there was just such a calm of all nature as best befitted Olympia and its festival. The Alpheus to our left formed the main characteristic, whilst on either side stretched an even, thickly-wooded alluvial plain, shut in by a range of mountains, softening in hillocks down to the plain. The whole extent lay covered, sometimes thickly, sometimes scantily, with interchanging brushwood, shrub, and timber. At every step, the landscape becomes more mild and cheerful. The Alpheus, despite the accession of the Ladon and Erymanthus, spreads itself out, unconscious of its importance, with a lazy tranquillity, as though unwilling too soon to leave the delightful region, or desirous to preserve a dignified sobriety in the neighbourhood of Zeus ju.eiX«»oj. It is nearly 180 feet broad, but hardly ever more than five feet deep. Its many meanderings, now lowering, now raising, its banks to the perpendicular, leave large patches of white sand, which gradually grow into staid islands. The small eminences over which we passed, developed by degrees VOL. II. M into hills, covered with a vigorous growth of all kinds of trees and shrubs--plane, oak, arbutus, and rhododendron, with an occasional broad outspreading valonea. Rushing brooks hurried across our path on their way to the Alpheus, interseamed with red fallows or quiet slopes of meadow-land. A nohle park it was, on the grandest scale, but without the trace of a proprietor. No village is seen, and very rarely even a single house. No boundary, nor sign of possession, is visible. The soil, of the richest quality...