How I hate descriptions of scenery! How murderous I feel when the
conventional novelist interrupts the most impassioned love-scene to
tell how the moonlight filtered through the ragged clouds, or how the
wind sighed through the naked branches of the trees, just as if
anybody cared what nature was doing when human nature held the stage!
And yet so marvellous is the fascination of Greece, so captivating the
scenes which meet the eye from the uninviting window of a plain little
foreign railroad train, that I cannot forbear to risk similar
maledictions by saying that it is too heavenly for common words to
express.
Now, I abominate railroads and I loathe ships. The only things I
really enjoy are a rocking-chair and a book. But much as I detest the
smell of car-smoke, and to find my face spotted with soot, and ill as
it makes me to ride backward, I would willingly travel every month of
the year over the road from Athens to Patras. The mountains are not so
high as to startle, the gulf not so vast as to shock. But with
gentleness you are drawn more and more into the net of its fascination
until the tears well to your eyes and there is a positive physical
ache in your heart.
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