“Ah! the pity of it! Thou Poor Bird! thy doing ’tis that now My Loved One’s eyes are swollen and red With weeping for her darling dead.”[2] Almost as pathetic, and quite as musical as this melancholy dirge, are some of the epigrams to be found in that charming volume of translations from the Greek Anthology, which Lilla Cabot Perry has aptly entitled _From the Garden of Hellas_. Here we have graceful and tender verses dedicated to the memory of pet beasts and birds and insects, one of them, indeed, bewailing the hard fate of a locust and a cicada, which, beloved by the same mistress, sleep, equally lamented, side by side: “Unto the locust, nightingale of fields, And the cicada, who was wont to drowse Through summer heat amid the oaken boughs, This common tomb the maiden Myro builds; And, like a child, weeps that she could not save These twain, her cherished playthings, from the grave.” What can be prettier than such a requiem sung by Leonidas, and breathing in every line a sentiment half natural, half assumed! We look back into the past, and smile, but with no unfeeling mirth, to see the tiny tomb with its cold and silent inmates whose shrill, amorous music is hushed for evermore. Nor were they alone in their sad distinction, for on every side other deserving insects were as decorously interred, and as tunefully bewailed. The poet who mourned for the “maiden Myro’s” playthings, was fain to sing with the same ready sympathy and the same charming grace the praises of Philænida’s pet locust, loved and lost: “What if small, O passer-by, Be this stone! ’tis mine you see. What if it you scarce descry! Philænida gave it me. “Praise her that she held me dear, Me, her little locust, singing, Whether in the stubble here Or amid the bushes winging. “Two long years she loved me well, Loved my drowsy lullaby; Me e’en dead did not repel, As these verses testify.” Another epigram by Mnasalcas bewails a similar loss, and inclines us slowly to the painful conviction that all Greece must have been in mourning for these short-lived insects, which, like poor Hinda’s tantalizing gazelles, appear to have made a point of dying just when they had grown most dear. It is a positive relief to find Meleager dedicating his verses to a pet cicada which is still alive and enjoying its master’s tender care: “Cicada, you who chase away desire, Cicada, who beguile our sleepless hours, You song-winged muse of meadows and of flowers, Who are the natural mimic of the lyre, Chirp a familiar melody and sweet, My weight of sleepless care to drive away; Your love-beguiling tune to me now play, Striking your prattling wings with your dear feet. In early morning I’ll bring gifts to you Of garlic ever fresh and drops of dew.”