beyond recognition. No common feature of a kind to form the basis of a
scientific classification can be traced in the spontaneous shepherd-songs
and their literary counterpart. What does appear to be a constant element
in the pastoral as known to literature is the recognition of a contrast,
implicit or expressed, between pastoral life and some more complex type of
civilization. At no stage in its development does literature, or at any
rate poetry, concern itself with the obvious, with the bare scaffolding of
life: whenever we find an author interested in the circle of prime
necessity we may be sure that he himself stands outside it. Thus the
shepherd when he sang did not insist upon the conditions amid which his
uneventful life was passed. It was left to a later, perhaps a wiser and a
sadder, generation to gaze with fruitless and often only half sincere
longing at the shepherd-boy asleep under the shadow of the thorn, lulled
by the low monotonous rustle of the grazing flock. Only when the
shepherd-songs ceased to be the outcome of unalloyed pastoral conditions
did they become distinctively pastoral. It is therefore significant that
the earliest pastoral poetry with which we are acquainted, whatever half
articulate experiments may have preceded it, was itself directly born of
the contrast between the recollections of a childhood spent among the
Sicilian uplands and the crowded social and intellectual city-life of
Alexandria[1].

As the result of this contrast there arises an idea which comes perhaps as
near being universal in pastoral as any--the idea, namely, of the 'golden
age.' This embraces, indeed, a field not wholly coincident with that of
pastoral, but the two are connected alike by a common spring in human
emotion and constant literary association. The fiction of an age of
simplicity and innocence found birth among the Augustan writers in the
midst of the complex and luxurious civilization of Rome, as an
illustration of the principle enunciated by Professer Raleigh, that