idyllic life, framed between the distant Etna and the sea. If he
strayed in the faint blue of the summer dawn, through the fens to the
shore, he might reach the wattled cabin of the two old fishermen in
the twenty-first idyl. There is nothing in Wordsworth more real,
more full of the incommunicable sense of nature, rounding and
softening the toilsome days of the aged and the poor, than the
Theocritean poem of the Fisherman's Dream. It is as true to nature
as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican. One cannot read
these verses but the vision returns to one, of sandhills by the sea,
of a low cabin roofed with grass, where fishing-rods of reed are
leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floats up her waves
that fill the waste with sound. This nature, grey and still, seems
in harmony with the wise content of old men whose days are waning on
the limit of life, as they have all been spent by the desolate margin
of the sea.

The twenty-first idyl is one of the rare poems of Theocritus that are
not filled with the sunlight of Sicily, or of Egypt. The landscapes
he prefers are often seen under the noonday heat, when shade is most
pleasant to men. His shepherds invite each other to the shelter of
oak-trees or of pines, where the dry fir-needles are strown, or where
the feathered ferns make a luxurious 'couch more soft than sleep,' or
where the flowers bloom whose musical names sing in the idyls.
Again, Theocritus will sketch the bare beginnings of the hillside, as
in the third idyl, just where the olive-gardens cease, and where the
short grass of the heights alternates with rocks, and thorns, and
aromatic plants. None of his pictures seem complete without the
presence of water. It may be but the wells that the maidenhair
fringes, or the babbling runnel of the fountain of the Nereids. The
shepherds may sing of Crathon, or Sybaris, or Himeras, waters so