Another poet, Aratus of Cilicia, whose very name has a smack of tillage, has left us a book about the weather [Greek:  Dosaemeia] which is quite as good to mark down a hay-day by as the later meteorologies of Professor Espy or Judge Butler.

Besides which, our friend Aratus holds the abiding honor of having been quoted by St. Paul, in his speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill:—­

“For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said:  ‘For we are also His offspring.’”

And Aratus, (after Elton,)—­

  “On thee our being hangs; in thee we move;
  All are thy offspring, and the seed of Jove.”

Scattered through the lesser Greek poets, and up and down the Anthology, are charming bits of rurality, redolent of the fields and of field-life, with which it would be easy to fill up the measure of this rainy day, and beat off the Grecian couplets to the tinkle of the eave-drops.  Up and down, the cicada chirps; the locust, “encourager of sleep,” sings his drowsy song; boozy Anacreon flings grapes; the purple violets and the daffodils crown the perfumed head of Heliodora; and the reverent Simonides likens our life to the grass.

Nor will I part company with these, or close up the Greek ranks of farmers, (in which I must not forget the great schoolmaster, Theophrastus,) until I cull a sample of the Anthology, and plant it for a guidon at the head of the column,—­a little bannerol of music, touching upon our topic, as daintily as the bees touch the flowering tips of the wild thyme.

It is by Zonas the Sardian:—­

[Greek:  Ai o agete nxouthai oimblaeides akra melissai,
K.T.L.,]

and the rendering by Mr. Hay:—­

“Ye nimble honey-making bees, the flowers are in their prime;
Come now and taste the little buds of sweetly breathing thyme,
Of tender poppies all so fair, or bits of raisin sweet,
Or down that decks the apple tribe, or fragrant violet;
Come, nibble on,—­your vessels store with honey while you can,
In order that the hive-protecting, bee-preserving Pan
May have a tasting for himself, and that the hand so rude,
That cuts away the comb, may leave yourselves some little food.”

Leaving now this murmur of the bees upon the banks of the Pactolus, will slip over-seas to Tusculum, where Cato was born, who was the oldest of the Roman writers upon agriculture; and thence into the Sabine territory, where, upon an estate of his father’s, in the midst of the beautiful country lying northward of the Monte Gennaro, (the Lucretilis of Horace,) he learned the art of good farming.

In what this art consisted in his day, he tells us in short, crackling speech;—­“Primum, bene arare; secundum, arare; tertium, stercorare.”  For the rest, he says, choose good seed, sow thickly, and pull all the weeds.  Nothing more would be needed to grow as good a crop upon the checkered plateau under my window as ever fattened among the Sabine Hills.