So Greece with one who has but a Baedeker knowledge of art, or Rome to
one who remembers her history vaguely as something that she "took" at
school, is simply maddening to one who forgets the technicalities of
dates and formulas, and rapturously breathes it in, scarcely knowing
whence came the love or knowledge of it, but realizing that one has at
last come into one's kingdom.
I was singularly fortunate from time to time in discovering these
kindred, sympathetic spirits. I met one party of three in Egypt, and
found them again in Greece, and crossed to Italy with them. It was a
mother and son and a lovely girl. They will never know, unless they
happen across this page, how much they were to me on the Adriatic, and
what a void they filled in Athens.
I found another such at Capri and Pompeii, and those beautiful days
stand out in my mind more for the company I was in than even the
wonders we went to see. That statement is strong but true. Yet my
various other fellow-travellers who were lacking in the one essential
of soul would never believe it, inasmuch as a person without a soul
cannot miss what she never had, and will not believe what she cannot
comprehend.
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