them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea."

This is what the eye beholds; and I dare not say that the idyl is
touched more with the melancholy of human fate for us than for the poet.
Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see everywhere at every hour. It is
a terrible sight. It is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs and
hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping eyes--despair made flesh. How
long has it suffered here? and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishers
and gave them a place in the country of his idyls? He spreads before us
the hills and fountains, and fills the scene-with shepherds, and
maidens, and laughing loves, and among the rest are these two poor old
men. The shadow of the world's poverty falls on this paradise now as
then. With the rock and sea it, too, endures.

A few traces of the old myths also survive on the landscape. Not far
from here, down the coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after the
fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the shore above which he
piped to Galatea. Some day I mean to take a boat and see them. But now I
let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy,
and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds of
Herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its
civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the
campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens,
the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves. Fain would I
recover the breath of that springtime; but while from my foot "every
stone upon the way spins singing," make what speed I can, I come not to
the harvest-feast. Bees go booming among the blossoms, and the flocks
crop their pasture, and night falls with Hesperus; but fruitless on my
lips, as at some shrine whence the god is gone, is Bion's prayer:
"Hesperus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam--dear