Even through the disguise of an English prose translation, you will see how pretty and how simple this little song must have been in the Greek, and how very natural is the language of it.  Our young peasant has fallen in love with the girl who is employed to play the flute for the reapers, as the peasants like to work to the sound of music.  His comrades do not much admire Bombyca; one calls her “a long grasshopper of a girl”; another finds her too thin; a third calls her a gipsy, such a dark brown her skin has become by constant exposure to the summer sun.  And the lover, looking at her, is obliged to acknowledge in his own mind that she is long and lean and dark and like a gipsy; but he finds beauty in all these characteristics, nevertheless.  What if she is dark?  The sweetest honey is darkish, like amber, and so are beautiful flowers, the best of all flowers, flowers given to Aphrodite; and the sacred hyacinth on whose leaves appear the letters of the word of lamentation “Ai!  Ai!”—­that is also dark like Bombyca.  Her darkness is that of honey and flowers.  What a charming apology!  He cannot deny that she is long and lean, and he remains silent on these points, but here we must all sympathize with him.  He shows good taste.  It is the tall slender girl that is really the most beautiful and the most graceful, not the large-limbed, strong-bodied peasant type that his companions would prefer.  Without knowing it, he has fallen in love like an artist.  And he is not blind to the, grace of slenderness and of form, though he cannot express it in artistic language.  He can only compare the shape of the girl’s feet to the ivory feet of the divinities in the temples—­perhaps he is thinking of some ivory image of Aphrodite which he has seen.  But how charming an image does he make to arise before us!  Beautiful is the description of the girl’s voice as “drowsy sweet.”  But the most exquisite thing in the whole song is the final despairing admission that he can not describe her at all—­“and thy ways, I can not tell of them”!  This is one of the most beautiful expressions in any poem ancient or modern, because of its supreme truth.  What mortal ever could describe the charm of manner, voice, smile, address, in mere words?  Such things are felt, they can not be described; and the peasant boy reaches the highest height of true lyrical poetry when he cries out “I can not tell of them.”  The great French critic Sainte-Beuve attempted to render this line as follows—­“Quant a ta maniere, je ne puis la rendre!" This is very good; and you can take your choice between it and any English translation.  But good judges say that nothing in English of French equals the charm of the original.

You will find three different classes of idyls in Theocritus; the idyl which is a simple song of peasant life, a pure lyric expressing only a single emotion; the idyl which is a little story, usually a story about the gods or heroes; and lastly, the idyl which is presented in the form of a dialogue, or even of a conversation between three or four persons.  All these forms of idyl, but especially the first and the third, were afterward beautifully imitated by the Roman poets; then very imperfectly imitated by modern poets.  The imitation still goes on, but the very best English poets have never really been able to give us anything worthy of Theocritus himself.