in turn a witness to his veracity.  He was born in the midst of nature that, through all the changes of things, has never lost its sunny charm.  The existence he loved best to contemplate, that of southern shepherds, fishermen, rural people, remains what it always has been in Sicily and in the isles of Greece.  The habits and the passions of his countryfolk have not altered, the echoes of their old love-songs still sound among the pines, or by the sea-banks, where Theocritus ‘watched the visionary flocks.’

Theocritus was probably born in an early decade of the third century, or, according to Couat, about 315 B.C., and was a native of Syracuse, ‘the greatest of Greek cities, the fairest of all cities.’  So Cicero calls it, describing the four quarters that were encircled by its walls,—each quarter as large as a town,—the fountain Arethusa, the stately temples with their doors of ivory and gold.  On the fortunate dwellers in Syracuse, Cicero says, the sun shone every day, and there was never a morning so tempestuous but the sunlight conquered at last, and broke through the clouds.  That perennial sunlight still floods the poems of Theocritus with its joyous glow.  His birthplace was the proper home of an idyllic poet, of one who, with all his enjoyment of the city life of Greece, had yet been ‘breathed on by the rural Pan,’ and best loved the sights and sounds and fragrant air of the forests and the coast.  Thanks to the mountainous regions of Sicily, to Etna, with her volcanic cliffs and snow-fed streams, thanks also to the hills of the interior, the populous island never lost the charm of nature.  Sicily was not like the overcrowded and over-cultivated Attica; among the Sicilian heights and by the coast were few enclosed estates and narrow farms.  The character of the people, too, was attuned to poetry.  The Dorian settlers had kept alive the magic of rivers, of pools where the Nereids dance, and uplands haunted by Pan.  This popular poetry influenced the literary verse of Sicily.  The songs of Stesichorus, a minstrel of the early period, and the little rural ‘mimes’ or interludes of Sophron are lost, and we have only fragments of Epicharmus.  But it seems certain that these poets, predecessors of Theocritus, liked to mingle with their own composition strains of rustic melody, volks-lieder, ballads, love-songs, ditties, and dirges, such as are still chanted by the peasants of Greece and Italy.  Thus in Syracuse and the other towns of the coast, Theocritus would have always before his eyes the spectacle of refined and luxurious manners, and always in his ears the babble of the Dorian women, while he had only to pass the gates, and wander through the fens of Lysimeleia, by the brackish mere, or ride into the hills, to find himself in the golden world of pastoral.  Thinking of his early years, and of the education that nature gives the poet, we can imagine him, like Callicles in Mr. Arnold’s poem, singing at the banquet of a merchant or a general—

‘With his head full of wine, and his hair crown’d,
Touching his harp as the whim came on him,
And praised and spoil’d by master and by guests,
Almost as much as the new dancing girl.’

We can recover the world that met his eyes and inspired his poems, though the dates of the composition of these poems are unknown.  We can follow him, in fancy, as he breaks from the revellers and wanders out into the night.  Wherever he turned his feet, he could find such scenes as he has painted in the idyls.  If the moon rode high in heaven, as he passed through the outlying gardens he might catch a glimpse of some deserted girl shredding the magical herbs into the burning brazier, and sending upward to the ‘lady Selene’ the song which was to charm her lover home.  The magical image melted in the burning, the herbs smouldered, the tale of love was told, and slowly the singer ‘drew the quiet night into her blood.’  Her lay ended with a passage of softened melancholy—

‘Do thou farewell, and turn thy steeds to Ocean, lady, and my pain I will endure, even as I have declared.  Farewell, Selene beautiful; farewell, ye other stars that follow the wheels of Night.’

A grammarian says that Theocritus borrowed this second idyl, the story of Simaetha, from a piece by Sophron.  But he had no need to borrow from anything but the nature before his eyes.  Ideas change so little among the Greek country people, and the hold of superstition is so strong, that betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their prayer for pity and help.  Theocritus himself could have added little passion to this incantation, still chanted in the moonlit nights of Greece: [0a]

‘Bright golden Moon, that now art near to thy setting, go thou and salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, and said, “Never will I leave thee.”  And, lo, he has left me, like a field reaped and gleaned, like a church where no man comes to pray, like a city desolate.  Therefore I would curse him, and yet again my heart fails me for tenderness, my heart is vexed within me, my spirit is moved with anguish.  Nay, even so I will lay my curse on him, and let God do even as He will, with my pain and with my crying, with my flame, and mine imprecations.’

It is thus that the women of the islands, like the girl of Syracuse two thousand years ago, hope to lure back love or avenged love betrayed, and thus they ‘win more ease from song than could be bought with gold.’

In whatever direction the path of the Syracusan wanderer lay, he would find then, as he would find now in Sicily, some scene of the idyllic life, framed between the distant Etna and the sea.  If he strayed in the faint blue of the summer dawn, through the fens to the shore, he might reach the wattled cabin of the two old fishermen in the twenty-first idyl.  There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense of nature, rounding and softening the toilsome days of the aged and the poor, than the Theocritean poem of the Fisherman’s Dream.  It is as true to nature as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican.  One cannot read these verses but the vision returns to one, of sandhills by the sea, of a low cabin roofed with grass, where fishing-rods of reed are leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floats up her waves that fill the waste with sound.  This nature, grey and still, seems in harmony with the wise content of old men whose days are waning on the limit of life, as they have all been spent by the desolate margin of the sea.

The twenty-first idyl is one of the rare poems of Theocritus that are not filled with the sunlight of Sicily, or of Egypt.  The landscapes he prefers are often seen under the noonday heat, when shade is most pleasant to men.  His shepherds invite each other to the shelter of oak-trees or of pines, where the dry fir-needles are strown, or where the feathered ferns make a luxurious ‘couch more soft than sleep,’ or where the flowers bloom whose musical names sing in the idyls.  Again, Theocritus will sketch the bare beginnings of the hillside, as in the third idyl, just where the olive-gardens cease, and where the short grass of the heights alternates with rocks, and thorns, and aromatic plants.  None of his pictures seem complete without