’Ηθελα να εΐμαι σ’ τα βουνα, μ’ αλάφια να κοιμοΰμαι Και το δικον σου το κορμι να μη το συλλογιοΰμαι ‘Would that I were on the high hills, and lay where lie the stags, and no more was troubled with the thought of thee.’ Here, again, is a love-complaint from modern Epirus, exactly in the tone of Battus’s song in the tenth idyl— ‘White thou art not, thou art not golden haired, Thou art brown, and gracious, and meet for love.’ Here is a longer love-ditty— ‘I will begin by telling thee first of thy perfections: thy body is as fair as an angel’s; no painter could design it. And if any man be sad, he has but to look on thee, and despite himself he takes courage, the hapless one, and his heart is joyous. Upon thy brows are shining the constellated Pleiades, thy breast is full of the flowers of May, thy breasts are lilies. Thou hast the eyes of a princess, the glance of a queen, and but one fault hast thou, that thou deignest not to speak to me.’ Battus might have cried thus, with a modern Greek singer, to the shade of the dead Amaryllis (Idyl IV), the ‘gracious Amaryllis, unforgotten even in death’— ‘Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee; what gift to the other world? The apple rots, and the quince decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals of the rose! I send thee my tears bound in a napkin, and what though the napkin burns, if my tears reach thee at last!’ The difficulty is to stop choosing, where all the verses of the modern Greek peasants are so rich in Theocritean memories, so ardent, so delicate, so full of flowers and birds and the music of fountains. Enough has been said, perhaps, to show what the popular poetry of Sicily could lend to the genius of Theocritus. From her shepherds he borrowed much,—their bucolic melody; their love-complaints; their rural superstitions; their system of answering couplets, in which each singer refines on the utterance of his rival. But he did not borrow their ‘pastoral melancholy.’ There is little of melancholy in Theocritus. When Battus is chilled by the thought of the death of Amaryllis, it is but as one is chilled when a thin cloud passes over the sun, on a bright day of early spring. And in an epigram the dead girl is spoken of as the kid that the wolf has seized, while the hounds bay all too late. Grief will not bring her back. The world must go its way, and we need not darken its sunlight by long regret. Yet when, for once, Theocritus adopted the accent of pastoral lament, when he raised the rural dirge for Daphnis into the realm of art, he composed a masterpiece, and a model for all later poets, as for the authors of _Lycidas_, _Thyrsis_, and _Adonais_.