Shulammith makes no answer, though she feels that the shepherd is conscious of her presence. She is, as it were, in an unapproachable steep, such as the wild dove selects for her shy nest. So he goes on: O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, In the covert of the steep! Let me see thy face, Let me hear thy voice, For sweet is thy voice, and thy face comely! She remains tantalizingly invisible, but becomes audible. She sings a snatch from a vineyard-watcher's song, hinting, perhaps, at the need in which her person (her "vineyard" as she elsewhere calls it) stands of protection against royal foxes, small and large. _Shulammith sings_ Take us the foxes, The little foxes, That spoil the vineyards: For our vines are in blossom! Then, in loving rapture, _Shulammith speaks in an aside_ My beloved is mine, and I am his: He feedeth his flock among the lilies! But she cannot refuse her lover one glance at herself, even though she appear only to warn him of his danger, to urge him to leave her and return when the day is over. _Shulammith entreatingly to her lover_ Until the evening breeze blows, And the shadows disappear (at sunset), Turn, my beloved! Be thou as a young hart Upon the cleft-riven hills! This is but one of the many dainty love idylls of this divine poem. Or, again, "could the curious helplessness of the dreamer in a dream and the yearning of a maiden's affection be more exquisitely expressed than in the lines beginning, I was asleep, but my heart waked"? But, indeed, as the critic I am quoting continues, "the felicities of expression and the happy imaginings of the poem are endless. The spring of nature and of love has been caught and fixed in its many exquisite lines, as only Shakespeare elsewhere has done it; and, understood as we think it must be understood, it has that ethical background of sacrifice and self-forgetting which all love must have to be thoroughly worthy." It is this ethical, or, as I prefer to term it, spiritual, background that discriminates the Song of Songs on the one hand from the Idylls of Theocritus, and, on the other, from the Syrian popular ditties. Some moderns, notably Budde, hold that the Book of Canticles is merely a collection of popular songs used at Syrian weddings, in which the bride figures as queen and her mate as king, just as Budde (wrongly) conceives them to figure in the Biblical Song. Budde suggests that there were "guilds of professional singers at weddings, and that we have in the Song of Songs simply the repertoire of some ancient guild-brother, who, in order to assist his memory, wrote down at random all the songs he could remember, or those he thought the best."