“The shepherd and his nymph were not long lacking in this Arcadian world. I met them crossing the fields, I spied them beneath the hedges, I learned to step loudly before entering the dairy with my pails of milk. I loved them, more perhaps as a part of the picture than for their own sakes. To me they were Daphnis and Chloe, not the game-keeper’s son and the farmer’s daughter. “The match was favourably viewed by Amos Pennistan, though Nancy was but eighteen and her lover two years older. I was honoured by an invitation to the wedding. I had already woven a little tale for myself around those country nuptials, a celebration which, although slightly irregular, would have become my lovers better than the parochial gentility which did actually attend their union. I had pictured them by a brook, Daphnis in, to our minds, becomingly inadequate clothing, Chloe’s muslin supplemented by chains of meadow flowers such as the children weave, accompanied by their flocks and the many young creatures, lambs, kids, and calves, as are characteristic of that least virginal of seasons. No wooing; no; or if there must be wooing, let it be sudden and primitive, and of the nature of a revelation, and let the oak trees be their roof that night, and the stars the witnesses of their natural and candid passion. But passion, poor soul! was put into stays and stockings, had his mad gallop checked into a walk, while fingers poked, eyes peeped, and tongues clacked round the prisoner. Alas for the secret of Daphnis and Chloe; shorn of the dignity of secrecy, it glared in the printed column, was brayed out from the pulpit, was totted up in pounds and shillings. Food entered to play his hospitable and clumsy part. For days Mrs. Pennistan baked, roasted, and kneaded cakes and pastries, and daily as she did it her temper disimproved. Such beauty as was Chloe’s, the beauty of health and artlessness, was devastated by the atrocious trappings of respectability.... “What a commonplace tale! you will say, and a vulgar one into the bargain! and indeed you will be right, if a miracle can become a commonplace through frequent working, and if you look upon the marriage of two young creatures as a social convenience, ordained, as we are told, for the procreation of lawful children. I have told you nothing but the love of rustic clowns. But as the great words of language, life and death, love and hate, sin, birth, war, bread and wine, are short and simple, and as the great classical emotions are direct and without complexity, so my rustic clowns are classical and enduring, because Adam and Eve, Daphnis and Chloe, Dick and Nancy, are no more than interchangeable names throughout the ages.