year through, where there is neither frost, nor is the heat so heavy
on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things blossom, and
evenly meted are darkness and dawn. Space is wide, and there be
many worlds, and suns enow, and the Sun-god surely has had a care of
his own. Little didst thou need, in thy native land, the isle of
the three capes, little didst thou need but sunlight on land and
sea. Death can have shown thee naught dearer than the fragrant
shadow of the pines, where the dry needles of the fir are strewn, or
glades where feathered ferns make "a couch more soft than Sleep."
The short grass of the cliffs, too, thou didst love, where thou
wouldst lie, and watch, with the tunny watcher till the deep blue
sea was broken by the burnished sides of the tunny shoal, and afoam
with their gambols in the brine. There the Muses met thee, and the
Nymphs, and there Apollo, remembering his old thraldom with Admetus,
would lead once more a mortal's flocks, and listen and learn,
Theocritus, while thou, like thine own Comatas, "didst sweetly
sing."

There, methinks, I see thee as in thy happy days, "reclined on deep
beds of fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and rejoicing in new stript
leaves of the vine, while far above thy head waved many a poplar,
many an elm-tree, and close at hand the sacred waters sang from the
mouth of the cavern of the nymphs." And when night came, methinks
thou wouldst flee from the merry company and the dancing girls, from
the fading crowns of roses or white violets, from the cottabos, and
the minstrelsy, and the Bibline wine, from these thou wouldst slip
away into the summer night. Then the beauty of life and of the
summer would keep thee from thy couch, and wandering away from
Syracuse by the sandhills and the sea, thou wouldst watch the low
cabin, roofed with grass, where the fishing-rods of reed were