the presence of water.  It may be but the wells that the maidenhair fringes, or the babbling runnel of the fountain of the Nereids.  The shepherds may sing of Crathon, or Sybaris, or Himeras, waters so sweet that they seem to flow with milk and honey.  Again, Theocritus may encounter his rustics fluting in rivalry, like Daphnis and Menalcas in the eighth idyl, ‘on the long ranges of the hills.’  Their kine and sheep have fed upwards from the lower valleys to the place where

‘The track winds down to the clear stream,
To cross the sparkling shallows; there
The cattle love to gather, on their way
To the high mountain pastures and to stay,
Till the rough cow-herds drive them past,
Knee-deep in the cool ford; for ’tis the last
Of all the woody, high, well-water’d dells
On Etna, . . .
. . . glade,
And stream, and sward, and chestnut-trees,
End here; Etna beyond, in the broad glare
Of the hot noon, without a shade,
Slope behind slope, up to the peak, lies bare;
The peak, round which the white clouds play.’  [0b]

Theocritus never drives his flock so high, and rarely muses on such thoughts as come to wanderers beyond the shade of trees and the sound of water among the scorched rocks and the barren lava.  The day is always cooled and soothed, in his idyls, with the ‘music of water that falleth from the high face of the rock,’ or with the murmurs of the sea.  From the cliffs and their seat among the bright red berries on the arbutus shrubs, his shepherds flute to each other, as they watch the tunny fishers cruising far below, while the echo floats upwards of the sailors’ song.  These shepherds have some touch in them of the satyr nature; we might fancy that their ears are pointed like those of Hawthorne’s Donatello, in ‘Transformation.’

It should be noticed, as a proof of the truthfulness of Theocritus, that the songs of his shepherds and goatherds are all such as he might really have heard on the shores of Sicily.  This is the real answer to the criticism which calls him affected.  When mock pastorals flourished at the court of France, when the long dispute as to the merits of the ancients and moderns was raging, critics vowed that the hinds of Theocritus were too sentimental and polite in their wooings.  Refinement and sentiment were to be reserved for princely shepherds dancing, crook in hand, in the court ballets.  Louis XIV sang of himself—

‘A son labeur il passe tout d’un coup,
Et n’ira pas dormir sur la fougere,
Ny s’oublier aupres d’une Bergere,
Jusques au point d’en oublier le Loup.’ [0c]

Accustomed to royal goatherds in silk and lace, Fontenelle (a severe critic of Theocritus) could not believe in the delicacy of a Sicilian who wore a skin ‘stripped from the roughest of he-goats, with the smell of the rennet clinging to it still.’  Thus Fontenelle cries, ‘Can any one suppose that there ever was a shepherd who could say “Would I were the humming bee, Amaryllis, to flit to thy cave, and dip beneath the branches, and the ivy leaves that hide thee”?’ and then he quotes other graceful passages from the love-verses of Theocritean swains.  Certainly no such fancies were to be expected from the French peasants of Fontenelle’s age, ‘creatures blackened with the sun, and bowed with labour and hunger.’  The imaginative grace of Battus is quite as remote from our own hinds.  But we have the best reason to suppose that the peasants of Theocritus’s time expressed refined sentiment in language adorned with colour and music, because the modern love-songs of Greek shepherds sound like memories of Theocritus.  The lover of Amaryllis might have sung this among his ditties—

Χελιδονάκι θα γενω, σ’ τα χείλη σου να καττώ
Να σε φιλήσω μια και δυό, και πάλε να πετάξω

‘To flit towards these lips of thine, I fain would be a swallow,
To kiss thee once, to kiss thee twice, and then go flying homeward.’ [0d]

In his despair, when Love ‘clung to him like a leech of the fen,’ he might have murmured—

’Ηθελα να εΐμαι σ’ τα βουνα, μ’ αλάφια να κοιμοΰμαι
Και το δικον σου το κορμι να μη το συλλογιοΰμαι

‘Would that I were on the high hills, and lay where lie the stags, and no more was troubled with the thought of thee.’

Here, again, is a love-complaint from modern Epirus, exactly in the tone of Battus’s song in the tenth idyl—

‘White thou art not, thou art not golden haired,
Thou art brown, and gracious, and meet for love.’

Here is a longer love-ditty—

‘I will begin by telling thee first of thy perfections: thy body is as fair as an angel’s; no painter could design it.  And if any man be sad, he has but to look on thee, and despite himself he takes courage, the hapless one, and his heart is joyous.  Upon thy brows are shining the constellated Pleiades, thy breast is full of the flowers of May, thy breasts are lilies.  Thou hast the eyes of a princess, the glance of a queen, and but one fault hast thou, that thou deignest not to speak to me.’

Battus might have cried thus, with a modern Greek singer, to the shade of the dead Amaryllis (Idyl IV), the ‘gracious Amaryllis, unforgotten even in death’—

‘Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee; what gift to the other world?  The apple rots, and the quince decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals of the rose!  I send thee my tears bound in a napkin, and what though the napkin burns, if my tears reach thee at last!’

The difficulty is to stop choosing, where all the verses of the modern Greek peasants are so rich in Theocritean memories, so ardent, so delicate, so full of flowers and birds and the music of fountains.  Enough has been said, perhaps, to show what the popular poetry of Sicily could lend to the genius of Theocritus.

From her shepherds he borrowed much,—their bucolic melody; their love-complaints; their rural superstitions; their system of answering couplets, in which each singer refines on the utterance of his rival.  But he did not borrow their ‘pastoral melancholy.’  There is little of melancholy in Theocritus.  When Battus is chilled by the thought of the death of Amaryllis, it is but as one is chilled when a thin cloud passes over the sun, on a bright day of early spring.  And in an epigram the dead girl is spoken of as the kid that the wolf has seized, while the hounds bay all too late.  Grief will not bring her back.  The world must go its way, and we need not darken its sunlight by long regret.  Yet when, for once, Theocritus adopted the accent of pastoral lament,