In his representative capacity as poet, Theocritus, speaking for his people, might have said with Gautier, "I am a man for whom the visible world exists." It is as impossible to cut the visible world loose from the invisible as to see the solid stretch of earth without seeing the light that streams upon it and makes the landscape; but Gautier came as near doing the impossible as any man could, and the goat-herds and pipe-players of Theocritus measurably approached this instable position. On Cape Cod, it is true, they looked "up and not down," but it is also true that they "looked in and not out"; in Sicily they looked neither up nor down, but straight ahead. The inevitable shadows fell across the fields whence the distracted Demeter sought Persephone, and Enceladus, uneasily bearing the weight of Ætna, poured out the vials of his wrath on thriving vineyards and on almond orchards white as with sea-foam; but the haunting sense of disaster in some other world beyond the dip of the sea was absent. If the hope of living with the gods was faint and far, and the forms of vanished heroes were vague and dim, the fear of retribution beyond the gate of death was a mere blurring of the landscape by a mist that came and went. The two workmen whose talk Theocritus overhears and reports in the _Tenth Idyll_ are not discussing the welfare of their souls; they are not even awake to the hard conditions of labor, and take no thought about shorter hours and higher wages: they are interested chiefly in Bombyca, "lean, dusk, a gypsy," " ...twinkling dice thy feet, Poppies thy lips, thy ways none knows how sweet!" And they lighten the hard task of the reaper of the stubborn corn in this fashion: "O rich in fruit and corn-blade: be this field Tilled well, Demeter, and fair fruitage yield! "Bind the sheaves, reapers: lest one, passing, say-- 'A fig for these, they're never worth their pay!' "Let the mown swathes look northward, ye who mow, Or westward--for the ears grow fattest so. "Avoid a noon-tide nap, ye threshing men: The chaff flies thickest from the corn-ears then. "Wake when the lark wakes; when he slumbers close Your work, ye reapers: and at noontide doze. "Boys, the frogs' life for me! They need not him Who fills the flagon, for in drink they swim. "Better boil herbs, thou toiler after gain, Than, splitting cummin, split thy hand in twain."