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 Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dimmer as much than the moon as thou art among the stars preeminent, hail, friend!” Dead now is that ritual.  Now more silent than ever is the country-side, missing Daphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart is young.  Sweet was his flute’s first triumph over Menaleas:  “Then was the boy glad, and leaped high, and clapped his hands over his victory, as a young fawn leaps about his mother”; but sweeter was the unwon victory when he strove with Damoetas:  “Then Damoetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended his song, and he gave Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave him a beautiful flute.  Damoetas fluted, and Daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon the calves, were dancing in the soft green grass.  Neither won the victory, but both were invincible.”  And him, too, I miss who loved his friend, and wished that they twain might “become a song in the ears of all men unborn,” even for their love’s sake; and prayed, “Would, O Father Cronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that this might be, and that when two generations have sped, one might bring these tidings to me by Acheron, the irremeable