THE VINE AND CIVILISATION. 23 
sleep! But as soon as it has touched the vinous shores of 
Attiea he becomes erect; his wings spread out; his sides are 
agitated; his eye launches out a look divine—it is the sacred 
fire that agitates him. The column, short and massive at 
Memphis, at Corinth rises gracefully in the air crowned with 
the acanthus. In the vineyards of the Peloponessus forms are 
purified — proportions are regularized. Egyptian art leaves 
marble as marble; under the chisel of the Greeks, on the con- 
trary, not only does it express the passions of humanity, but 
it attains a dignity of mind, an elevation of sentiment, belong- 
ing to beings of a superior nature. 
‘‘ Greece has thrown on the world the seeds of an inexhaust- 
ible civilisation. It is in her that poets, historians, statesmen 
and physicians must seek models. Still the immortal produc- 
tions of her genius are transmitted to us incomplete and falsi- 
fied through ages of barbarity; and notwithstanding all the 
ravages of time, and of ignorance, generations after genera- 
tions bow themselves as they pass before them in reverence 
and admiration. 
‘*To enumerate all the celebrated wines of ancient Greece 
we should have to name all the provinces—all the islands of 
the Ionian and Egean seas. Wine was the material principle 
that raised and sustained Greek civilisation to an elevation 
that no other civilisation ever attained. This was the opinion 
of Csculapius, the highest medical authority of Greece, in 
regard to that drink that Homer called divine. 
‘s When, after the conquest of Alexander, the narcotics of 
the Orient reacted on to the Peloponessus; when Bacchus 
ceded a part of his empire to the incense, to the myrrh, to the 
perfumes, to the opium introduced from the banks of the Indus 
or the Island of Taprobana (Ceylon), the moral life of Greece 
became obscured. Her artists ceased to create the finest works 
