In the country of Theocritus there was great chance for poetry; not because anybody was taught anything, but because everybody was born in an atmosphere that was a diffused poetry. If this had not been true, the poet could not have spread a soft mist of poesy over the whole island: no man works that kind of magic unaided; he compounds his potion out of simples culled from the fields round him. Theocritus does not disguise the rudeness of the life he describes; goat-herds and he-goats are not the conventional properties of the poetic stage. The poet was without a touch of the drawing-room consciousness of crude things, though he knew well softness and charm of life in Syracuse under a tyrant who did not "patronize the arts," but was instructed by them. To him the distinction between poetic and unpoetic things was not in the appearance, but in the root. He was not ashamed of Nature as he found her, and he never apologized for her coarseness by avoiding things not fit for refined eyes. His shepherds and goat-herds are often gross and unmannerly, and as stuffed with noisy abuse as Shakespeare's people in "Richard III." Lacon and Cometas, rival poets of the field, are having a controversy, and this is the manner of their argument: "LACON "When learned I from thy practice or thy preaching aught that's right, Thou puppet, thou mis-shapen lump of ugliness and spite? "COMETAS "When? When I beat thee, wailing sore; your goats looked on with glee, And bleated; and were dealt with e'en as I had dealt with thee." And then, without a pause, the landscape shines through the noisy talk: "Nay, here are oaks and galingale: the hum of housing bees Makes the place pleasant, and the birds are piping in the trees, And here are two cold streamlets; here deeper shadows fall Than yon place owns, and look what cones drop from the pine tree tall." Thoreau, to press the analogy from painting a little further, lays the undertones on with a firm hand: "It is a wild, rank place and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up,--a vast _morgue_, where famished dogs may range in packs, and cows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds, and tucks fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature,--inhumanely sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray."