sands of the salt lagoon, and he wandered once more amid the green woods
and pastures of Trinacria, the noonday sun tempered by the shade of the
chestnuts and the babbling of the brook, and by the cool airs that glide
down from the white cliffs of Aetna. There once more he saw the shepherds
tend their flocks, singing or wrangling with one another, dreamily piping
on their wax-stopped reeds or plotting to annex their neighbours' gear; or
else there sounded in his ears the love-song or the dirge, or the
incantation of the forsaken girl rose amid the silence to the silver moon.
Once again he stood upon the shore and watched the fishers cast their
nets, while around him the goats browsed on the close herbage of the
cliff, and the crystal stream leapt down, and the waves broke upon the
rocks below, till he saw the breasts of the nymphs shine in the whiteness
of the foam and their hair spread wide in the weed, and the fair Galatea,
the enticing and the fickle, mocked the clumsy suit of the Cyclops, as she
tossed upward the bitter spray from off her shining limbs. All these
memories he recorded with a loving faithfulness of detail that it is even
now possible to verify from the folk-songs of the south. To this day in
the Isles of Greece ruined girls seek to lure back their lovers with
charms differing but little from that sung by the Syracusan to Lady
Selene, and the popular poetry alike of Italy and Greece is full of those
delicate touches of refined sentiment that in Theocritus appear so
incongruous with the rough coats and rougher banter of the shepherds. For
though the poet raised the pastoral life of Sicily into the realms of
ideal poetry, he was careful not to dissociate his version from reality,
and he allowed no imaginary conceptions to overmaster his art. He depicted
no age of innocence; his poetry reflects no philosophical illusion of
primitive simplicity; he elaborated no imaginary cult of mystical worship.
His art, however little it may tempt us to the use of the term realism, is
nevertheless based on an almost passionate sympathy with actual human
nature. This is the fount of his inspiration, the central theme of his