so delicate, so full of flowers and birds and the music of fountains.
Enough has been said, perhaps, to show what the popular poetry of
Sicily could lend to the genius of Theocritus.

From her shepherds he borrowed much,--their bucolic melody; their
love-complaints; their rural superstitions; their system of answering
couplets, in which each singer refines on the utterance of his rival.
But he did not borrow their 'pastoral melancholy.' There is little
of melancholy in Theocritus. When Battus is chilled by the thought
of the death of Amaryllis, it is but as one is chilled when a thin
cloud passes over the sun, on a bright day of early spring. And in
an epigram the dead girl is spoken of as the kid that the wolf has
seized, while the hounds bay all too late. Grief will not bring her
back. The world must go its way, and we need not darken its sunlight
by long regret. Yet when, for once, Theocritus adopted the accent of
pastoral lament, when he raised the rural dirge for Daphnis into the
realm of art, he composed a masterpiece, and a model for all later
poets, as for the authors of Lycidas, Thyrsis, and Adonais.

Theocritus did more than borrow a note from the country people. He
brought the gifts of his own spirit to the contemplation of the
world. He had the clearest vision, and he had the most ardent love
of poetry, 'of song may all my dwelling be full, for neither is sleep
more sweet, nor sudden spring, nor are flowers more delicious to the
bees, so dear to me are the Muses.' . . . 'Never may we be sundered,
the Muses of Pieria and I.' Again, he had perhaps in greater measure
than any other poet the gift of the undisturbed enjoyment of life.
The undertone of all his idyls is joy in the sunshine and in
existence. His favourite word, the word that opens the first idyl,
and, as it were, strikes the keynote, is [Greek], sweet. He finds