George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea:
“Last night the wind changed and the sky began to clear; this morning I awoke in sunshine, and with a feeling of eagerness for my journey. I shall look upon the Ionian Sea, not merely from a train or a steamboat as before, but at long leisure: I shall see the shores where once were Tarentum and Sybaris, Croton and Locri. Every man has his intellectual desire; mine is to escape life as I know it and dream myself into that old world which was the imaginative delight of my boyhood. The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others; they make me young again, and restore the keen impressions of that time when every new page of Greek or Latin was a new perception of things beautiful. The world of the Greeks and Romans is my land of romance; a quotation in either language thrills me strangely, and there are passages of Greek and Latin verse which I cannot read without a dimming of the eyes, which I cannot repeat aloud because my voice fails me. In Magna Graecia the waters of two fountains mingle and flow together; how exquisite will be the draught!”
Greek and Latin mingle together just as those two fountains. Reminds me of Horace’s lines about the influence of the Greeks upon the Romans: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit / et artes intulit agresti Latio.–Epodes 2.1.156,157. Both languages often seem to embrace each other, and there is beauty, the beauty of our universal humanity.
re pppppppost!