No More Learning

"Well, Ned? " said Wickliff.
"It's nice! " said Paisley.
"That's right. Now you get a firm grip on what I'm going
to say,- such a grip you won't lose it, even if you get out of
your head a little. "
―――――――
-
"I won't," said Paisley.
"All right. You're not Paisley any more. You're Ned Smith.
I've had you moved here into my rooms because your boarding-
place wasn't so good. Everybody here understands, and has got
their story ready. The nurse thinks you're my friend Smith. You
are, too, and you are to call me Amos. The telegram's gone.
'S-sh! what a way to do! " - for Paisley was crying. "Ain't I
her boy too? "
One weak place remained in the fortress that Amos had
builded against prying eyes and chattering tongues. He had


## p. 14755 (#329) ##########################################

OCTAVE THANET
14755
searched in vain for "Mame. " There was no especial reason,
except pure hatred and malice, to dread her going to Paisley's
mother; but the sheriff had enough knowledge of Mame's kind
to take these qualities into account.
From the time that Wickliff promised him that he should
have his mother, Paisley seemed to be freed from every misgiv
ing. He was too ill to talk much, and much of the time he was
miserably occupied with his own suffering; yet often during the
night and day before she came he would lift his still beautiful
eyes to Mrs. Raker's, and say, "It's to-morrow night ma comes,
isn't it? " To which the soft-hearted woman would sometimes
answer, "Yes, son," and sometimes only work her chin, and put
her handkerchief to her eyes. Once she so far forgot the pres-
ence of the gifted professional nurse that she sniffed aloud;
whereupon that personage administered a scorching tonic, in the
guise of a glance, and poor Mrs. Raker went out of the room
and cried.
He must have kept some reckoning of the time, for the next
day he varied his question. He said, "It's to-day she's coming,
isn't it? " As the day wore on, the customary change of his
disease came: he was relieved of his worst pain; he thought
that he was better. So thought Mrs. Raker and the sheriff. The
doctor and the nurse maintained their inscrutable professional
calm. At ten o'clock the sheriff (who had been gone for a half-
hour) softly opened the door. The sick man instantly roused.
He half sat up. "I know," he exclaimed: "it's ma. Ma's
come! "
The nurse rose, ready to protect her patient.
There entered a little, black-robed, gray-haired woman, who
glided swift as a thought to the bedside, and gathered the worn
young head to her breast. "My boy, my dear, good boy! " she
said under her breath, so low the nurse did not hear her; she
only heard her say, "Now you must get well. "
"Oh, I am glad, ma! " said the sick man.
After that the nurse was well content with them all. They
obeyed her implicitly. It was she rather than Mrs. Raker who
observed that Mr. Smith's mother was not alone, but accompa-
nied by a slim, fair, brown-eyed young woman, who lingered in
the background, and would fain have not spoken to the invalid
at all had she not been gently pushed forward by the mother,
with the words, "And Ruth came too, Eddy! "


## p. 14756 (#330) ##########################################

14756
OCTAVE THANET
"Thank you, Ruth: I knew that you wouldn't let ma come
alone," said Ned feebly.
The young woman had opened her lips. Now they closed.
She looked at him compassionately. "Surely not, Ned," she said.
But why, wondered the nurse, who was observant,—it was
her trade to observe,- why did she look at him so intently, and
with such a shocked pity?
Ned did not express much,- the sick, especially the very sick,
cannot; but whenever he waked in the night, and saw his mother
bending over him, he smiled happily, and she would answer his
thought. "Yes, my boy; my dear, good boy," she would say.
And the sheriff in his dim corner thought sadly that the
ruined life would always be saved for her now, and her son
would be her good boy forever. Yet he muttered to himself, “I
suppose the Lord is helping me out, and I ought to feel obliged,
but I'm hanged if I wouldn't rather take the chances and have
the boy get well! "
But he knew all the time that there was no hope for Ned's
life. He lived three days after his mother came. The day be-
fore his death, he was alone for a short time with the sheriff,
and asked him to be good to his mother. "Ruth will be good
to her too," he said; "but last night I dreamed Mame was chas-
ing mother, and it scared me. You won't let her get at mother,
will you? "
"Of course I won't," said the sheriff: "we're watching your
mother every minute; and if that woman comes here, Raker has
orders to clap her in jail. And I will always look out for your
ma, Ned, and she never shall know. "
"That's good," said Ned, in his feeble voice.
"I'll tell you
something. I always wanted to be good, but I was always bad;
but I believe I would have been decent if I'd lived, because I'd
have kept close to you. You'll be good to ma- and to Ruth! "
The sheriff thought that he had drifted away and did not
hear the answer, but in a few moments he opened his eyes and
said brightly, "Thank you, Amos. " It was the first time that
he had used the other man's Christian name.
"Yes, Ned," said the sheriff.
him.
Next morning at daybreak he died. His mother was with
Just before he went to sleep his mind wandered a little.
He fancied that he was a little boy, and that he was sick, and
wanted to say his prayers to his mother. "But I'm so sick I


## p. 14757 (#331) ##########################################

OCTAVE THANET
14757
can't get out of bed," said he. "God won't mind my saying
them in bed, will he? " Then he folded his hands, and reverently
repeated the childish rhyme; and so fell into a peaceful sleep,
which deepened into peace. In this wise, perhaps, were answered
many prayers.
Amos made all the arrangements the next day. He said that
they were going home from Fairport on the day following, but he
managed to conclude all the necessary legal formalities in time to
take the evening train. Once on the train, and his companions
in their sections, he drew a long breath.
"It may not have been Mame that I saw," he said, taking
out his cigar-case on the way to the smoking-room: "it was
merely a glimpse - she in a buggy, me on foot; and it may
be she wouldn't do a thing, or think the game worth blackmail:
but I don't propose to run any chances in this deal. Hullo-
excuse me, miss! "
The last words were uttered aloud to Ruth Graves, who
had touched him on the arm. He had a distinct admiration for
this young woman, founded on the grounds that she cried very
quietly, that she never was underfoot, and that she was so un-
obtrusively kind to Mrs. Smith.
"Anything I can do? " he began with genuine willingness.
She motioned him to take a seat. " Mrs. Smith is safe in her
section," she said: "it isn't that. I wanted to speak to you. Mr.
Wickliff, Ned told me how it was. He said he couldn't die lying
to everybody, and he wanted me to know how good you were.
I am perfectly safe, Mr. Wickliff," as a look of annoyance puck-
ered the sheriff's brow. "He told me there was a woman who
might some time try to make money out of his mother if she
could find her, and I was to watch. Mr. Wickliff, was she rather
tall and slim, with a fine figure? "
"Yes-dark-complected rather, and has a thin face and a
largish nose. "
"And one of her eyes is a little droopy, and she has a gold
filling in her front tooth? Mr. Wickliff, that woman got on this
train. "
――
"She did, did she? " said the sheriff, showing no surprise.
"Well, my dear young lady, I'm very much obliged to you. I
will attend to the matter. Mrs. Smith shan't be disturbed. "
<< Thank you," " said the young woman: "that's all. Good-
night! "


## p. 14758 (#332) ##########################################

14758
OCTAVE THANET
"You might know that girl had had a business education,"
the sheriff mused: "says what she's got to say, and moves on.
Poor Ned! Poor Ned! "
Ruth went to her section, but she did not undress. She sat
behind the curtains, peering through the opening at Mrs. Smith's
section opposite, or at the lower berth next hers, which was
occupied by the sheriff. The curtains were drawn there also,
and presently she saw him disappear by sections into their shel-
ter. Then his shoes were pushed partially into the aisle. Empty
shoes. She waited: it could not be that he was really going to
sleep. But the minutes crept by; a half-hour passed: no sign of
life behind his curtains. An hour passed. At the farther end
of the car the curtains parted, and a young woman slipped out
of her berth. She was dark and not handsome; but an elegant
shape and a modish gown made her attractive-looking. One of
her eyelids drooped a little.
She walked down the aisle and paused before Mrs. Smith's
section, Ruth holding her breath. She looked at the big shoes
on the floor, her lip curling. Then she took the curtains of Mrs.
Smith's section in both hands and put her head in.
"I must stop her! " thought Ruth. But she did not spring
out. The sheriff, fully dressed, was beside the woman, and an
arm of iron deliberately turned her round.
"The game's up, Mamie," said Wickliff.
She made no noise, only looked at him.
"What are you going to do? " said she, with perfect com-
posure.
"Arrest you if you make a racket, talk to you if you don't.
Go into that seat. >>> He indicated a seat in the rear, and she
took it without a word. He sat near the aisle; she was by the
window.
"I suppose you mean to sit here all night," she remarked
scornfully.
"Not at all," said he; "just to the next place. Then you'll
get out. "
"Oh, will I? "
"You will. Either you will get out and go about your busi-
ness, or you will get out and be taken to jail. "
"We're smart. What for? »
"For inciting prisoners to escape. "
"Ned's dead," with a sneer.


## p. 14759 (#333) ##########################################

OCTAVE THANET
14759
"Yes, he's dead, and "- he watched her narrowly, although he
seemed absorbed in buttoning his coat-"they say he haunts
his old cell, as if he'd lost something. Maybe it's the letter you.
folded up small enough to go in the seam of a coat.
I've got
that. "
He saw that she was watching him in turn, and that she
was nervous. "Ned's dead, poor fellow, true enough; but-the
girl at Barber & Glasson's ain't dead. "
She began to fumble with her gloves, peeling them off and
rolling them into balls. He thought to himself that the chances
were that she was superstitious.
"Look here," he said, sharply: "have an end of this nonsense.
You get off at the next place, and never bother that old lady
again, or—I will have you arrested, and you can try for yourself
whether Ned's cell is haunted. "
For a brief space they eyed each other, she in an access of
impotent rage, he stolid as the carving of the seat. The car
shivered; the great wheels moved more slowly. "Decide,” said
he: not imperatively-dryly; without emotion of any sort. He
kept his mild eyes on her.
"It wasn't his mother I meant to tell; it was that girl— that
nice girl he wanted to marry —”
"You make me tired," said the sheriff. "Are you going, or
am I to make a scene and take you? I don't care much. "
She slipped her hand behind her into her pocket.
The sheriff laughed and grasped one wrist.
"I don't want to talk to the country fools," she snapped.
"This way," said the sheriff, guiding her. The train had
stopped. She laughed as he politely handed her off the plat-
form; the next moment the wheels were turning again and she
was gone. He never saw her again.
The porter came out to stand by his side in the vestibule,
watching the lights of the station race away and the darkling
winter fields fly past. The sheriff was well known to him; he
nodded an eager acquiescence to the officer's request: "If those
ladies in 8 and 9 ask you any questions, just tell them it was a
crazy woman getting the wrong section, and I took care of her. "
Within the car a desolate mother wept the long night through,
yet thanked God amid her tears for her son's last good days;
and did not dream of the blacker sorrow that had menaced her
and had been hurled aside.


## p. 14760 (#334) ##########################################

14760
CELIA THAXTER
(1836-1894)
T
HE poetry of Celia Thaxter suggests the happy results for
literature when a poetic nature draws inspiration from some
imaginative stimulus, and lets that inspiration dominate
without confusing or weakening it with others. With Mrs. Thaxter
such a stimulus was the sea. It was on the northern sea-coast of
New England that she lived, knew joy and sorrow, and wrote out
of her heart experiences. Her verse reflects the impressions upon a
sensitive soul of the sea-birds and the island blooms, of the glory and
tragedy of the illimitable ocean, and the
overarch of the more illimitable sky; while
the drama of human existence, interwoven
of good and ill, is always present, lending
pathos to the beauty of nature, and imbu-
ing with a tender melancholy the tonic of
sea air and free communion with fair cre-
ated things.

CELIA THAXTER
Celia Leighton was born June 29th, 1836,
at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Her father
was a disappointed politician who became
keeper of the White Island Light, Isles of
Shoals; SO that Celia grew up compan-
ioned by sea and sky. In her maturity she
established her residence upon Appledore
Island, one of the Isles of Shoals. There she married Levi Lincoln
Thaxter in 1851; and for many years she wrote poetry, painted,
enjoyed music, tended her garden; and at last, on August 26th, 1894.
passed away, having won a distinct reputation as a singer of sin-
cerity, charm, and power. When Lowell, as editor of the Atlantic,
printed her first poem, 'Landlocked,' he recognized hers as a new
voice, not an echo. The Sandpiper is as well known and loved
as any verse written by an American woman. In the finest of Mrs.
Thaxter's lyrics, felicitous description, a deep human sympathy, and
sense of the dramatic are to be noted. Her verse is strong as
well as sweet; it can be objective and have narrative interest, as
well as be purely lyrical. Its movement and vigor preserve it from
weakness or sentimentality. The didactic and moral creep in at


## p. 14761 (#335) ##########################################

CELIA THAXTER
14761
times to the injury of the work as art, but this is only occasionally
a defect. There is in much of Mrs. Thaxter's poetry an undertone
of sadness,— easily explained by events in the poet's life, for she was
not unacquainted with grief. In poems like The Watch of Boon
Island' or 'The Tryst,' her sense of the gloom and doom of life
comes boldly out. She was naturally, however, of a buoyant, san-
guine temperament, and the mood of faith and hope prevails in her
verse. The love of the sea and the love of flowers were passions
with her; music was dear to her heart, and as a motive it is found
in some of her loveliest poems,-Beethoven,' 'Schumann's Sonata
in A Minor,' and others. She was widely receptive to the arts. She
wrote charming prose, but it is as a singer that she will survive in
American literature.
Mrs. Thaxter's first volume of poems appeared in 1872; the next
year, 'Among the Isles of Shoals,' a prose history with autobiographic
touches, was published. 'Driftweed' (1879), 'Poems for Children'
(1884), The Cruise of The Mystery, and Other Poems' (1886), and
'An Island Garden,' a prose diary of her Appledore life, printed in
a beautiful illustrated edition in the year of her death, complete the
list of this genuine singer's works.
[The following poems of Celia Thaxter are copyrighted, and are reprinted
here by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers. ]
SORROW
PON my lips she laid her touch divine,
And merry speech and careless laughter died;
She fixed her melancholy eyes on mine,
And would not be denied.
UPON
I saw the West Wind loose his cloudlets white
In flocks, careering through the April sky;
I could not sing, though joy was at its height,
For she stood silent by.
I watched the lovely evening fade away;
A mist was lightly drawn across the stars:
She broke my quiet dream,-I heard her say,
"Behold your prison bars!
"Earth's gladness shall not satisfy your soul;
This beauty of the world in which you live,
The crowning grace that sanctifies the whole,-
That, I alone can give. "


## p. 14762 (#336) ##########################################

14762
CELIA THAXTER
I heard, and shrank away from her afraid:
But still she held me, and would still abide;
Youth's bounding pulses slackened and obeyed,
With slowly ebbing tide.
"Look thou beyond the evening star," she said,
"Beyond the changing splendors of the day;
Accept the pain, the weariness, the dread,—
Accept, and bid me stay! "
I turned and clasped her close with sudden strength;
And slowly, sweetly, I became aware
Within my arms God's angel stood at length,
White-robed and calm and fair.
And now I look beyond the evening star,
Beyond the changing splendors of the day,—
Knowing the pain He sends more precious far,
More beautiful than they.
SEAWARD
To
How
ow long it seems since that mild April night,
When, leaning from the window, you and I
Heard, clearly ringing from the shadowy bight,
The loon's unearthly cry!
Southwest the wind blew, million little waves
Ran rippling round the point in mellow tune;
But mournful, like the voice of one who raves,
That laughter of the loon!
We called to him, while blindly through the haze
Uprose the meagre moon behind us, slow,-
So dim the fleet of boats we scarce could trace,
Moored lightly just below.
We called, and lo, he answered! Half in fear
We sent the note back. Echoing rock and bay
Made melancholy music far and near,
Sadly it died away.
That schooner, you remember? Flying ghost!
Her canvas catching every wandering beam,
Aerial, noiseless, past the glimmering coast
She glided like a dream.


## p. 14763 (#337) ##########################################

CELIA THAXTER
14763
Would we were leaning from your window now,
Together calling to the eerie loon,
The fresh wind blowing care from either brow,
This sumptuous night of June!
So many sighs load this sweet inland air,
'Tis hard to breathe, nor can we find relief:
However lightly touched, we all must share
This nobleness of grief.
But sighs are spent before they reach your ear;
Vaguely they mingle with the water's rune.
No sadder sound salutes you than the clear,
Wild laughter of the loon.
THE SANDPIPER
CROSS the narrow beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I;
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,-
One little sandpiper and I.
A
Above our heads the sullen clouds
Scud black and swift across the sky;
Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds
Stand out the white light-houses high.
Almost as far as eye can reach
I see the close-reefed vessels fly,
As fast we flit along the beach,-
One little sandpiper and I.
I watch him as he skims along
Uttering his sweet and mournful cry.
He starts not at my fitful song,
Or flash of fluttering drapery;
He has no thought of any wrong;
He scans me with a fearless eye:
Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong,
The little sandpiper and I.
Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night
When the loosed storm breaks furiously?


## p. 14764 (#338) ##########################################

14764
CELIA THAXTER
My driftwood fire will burn so bright!
To what warm shelter canst thou fly?
I do not fear for thee, though wroth
The tempest rushes through the sky:
For are we not God's children both,
Thou, little sandpiper, and I?
THE WATCH OF BOON ISLAND
HEY crossed the lonely and lamenting sea;
TH
Its moaning seemed but singing. "Wilt thou dare,"
He asked her, "brave the loneliness with me? "
"What loneliness," she said, "if thou art there? "
Afar and cold on the horizon's rim
Loomed the tall light-house, like a ghostly sign;
They sighed not as the shore behind grew dim,-
A rose of joy they bore across the brine.
They gained the barren rock, and made their home
Among the wild waves and the sea-birds wild;
The wintry winds blew fierce across the foam,
But in each other's eyes they looked and smiled.
Aloft the light-house sent its warnings wide,
Fed by their faithful hands; and ships in sight
With joy beheld it, and on land men cried,
"Look, clear and steady burns Boon Island light! "
And while they trimmed the lamp with busy hands,
"Shine far and through the dark, sweet light," they cried;
"Bring safely back the sailors from all lands
To waiting love, wife, mother, sister, bride! "
No tempest shook their calm, though many a storm
Tore the vexed ocean into furious spray;
No chi could find them in their Eden warm,
And gently Time lapsed onward day by day.
Said I no chill could find them? There is one
Whose awful footfalls everywhere are known,
With echoing sobs, who chills the summer sun,
And turns the happy heart of youth to stone;
Inexorable Death, a silent guest
At every hearth, before whose footsteps flee


## p. 14765 (#339) ##########################################

CELIA THAXTER
14765
All joys; who rules the earth, and without rest
Roams the vast shuddering spaces of the sea.
Death found them; turned his face and passed her by,
But laid a finger on her lover's lips,
And there was silence. Then the storm ran high,
And tossed and troubled sore the distant ships.
Nay, who shall speak the terrors of the night,
The speechless sorrow, the supreme despair?
Still like a ghost she trimmed the waning light,
Dragging her slow weight up the winding stair.
With more than oil the saving lamp she fed,
While lashed to madness the wild sea she heard;
She kept her awful vigil with the dead,
And God's sweet pity still she ministered.
O sailors, hailing loud the cheerful beam,
Piercing so far the tumult of the dark,
A radiant star of hope,- you could not dream
What misery there sat cherishing that spark!
Three times the night, too terrible to bear,
Descended, shrouded in the storm. At last
The sun rose clear and still on her despair,
And all her striving to the winds she cast,
And bowed her head and let the light die out,
For the wide sea lay calm as her dead love.
When evening fell, from the far land, in doubt,
Vainly to find that faithful star men strove.
Sailors and landsmen look, and women's eyes,
For pity ready, search in vain the night,
And wondering neighbor unto neighbor cries,
"Now what, think you, can ail Boon Island light? "
Out from the coast toward her high tower they sailed;
They found her watching, silent, by her dead,
A shadowy woman, who nor wept nor wailed,
But answered what they spake, till all was said.
They bore the dead and living both away.
With anguish time seemed powerless to destroy
She turned, and backward gazed across the bay,-
Lost in the sad sea lay her rose of joy.


## p. 14766 (#340) ##########################################

14766
CELIA THAXTER
O
NLY to follow you, dearest, only to find you!
Only to feel for one instant the touch of your hand;
Only to tell you once of the love you left behind you,-
To say the world without you is like a desert of sand;
That the flowers have lost their perfume, the rose its splendor,
And the charm of nature is lost in a dull eclipse;
That joy went out with the glance of your eyes so tender,
And beauty passed with the lovely smile on your lips.
IMPATIENCE
I did not dream it was you who kindled the morning,
And folded the evening purple in peace so sweet;
But you took the whole world's rapture without a warning,
And left me naught save the print of your patient feet.
I count the days and the hours that hold us asunder;
I long for Death's friendly hand which shall rend in twain,
With the glorious lightning flash and the golden thunder,
These clouds of the earth, and give me my own again!
WHIT
IN DEATH'S DESPITE
HITHER departs the perfume of the rose?
Into what life dies music's golden sound?
Year after year life's long procession goes
To hide itself beneath the senseless ground.
Upon the grave's inexorable brink
Amazed with loss the human creature stands:
Vainly he tries to reason or to think,
Left with his aching heart and empty hands;
He calls his lost in vain. In sorrow drowned,
Darkness and silence all his sense confound.
Till in Death's roll-call stern he hears his name,
In turn he follows and is lost to sight;
Though comforted by love and crowned by fame,
He hears the summons dread no man may slight.
Sweetly and clear upon his quiet grave
The birds shall sing, unmindful of his dust;
Softly in turn the long green grass shall wave
Over his fallen head. In turn he must
Submit to be forgotten, like the rest,
Though high the heart that beat within his breast.


## p. 14767 (#341) ##########################################

CELIA THAXTER
The rose falls, and the music's sound is gone;
Dear voices cease, and clasp of loving hands;
Alone we stand when the brief day is done,
Searching with saddened eyes earth's darkening lands.
Worthless as is the lightest fallen leaf
We seem; yet constant as the night's first star
Kindles our deathless hope, and from our grief
Is born the trust no misery can mar,
That Love shall lift us all despair above,
Shall conquer death,-yea, Love, and only Love!
A
WILD GEESE
FAR, strange sound through the night,
A dauntless and resolute cry,
Clear in the tempest's despite,
Ringing so wild and so high!
Darkness and tumult and dread,
Rain and the battling of gales,
Yet cleaving the storm overhead,
The wedge of the wild geese sails:
Pushing their perilous way,
Buffeted, beaten, and vexed;
Steadfast by night and by day,
Weary, but never perplexed;
Sure that the land of their hope
Waits beyond tempest and dread,
Sure that the dark where they grope
Shall glow with the morning red!
Clangor that pierces the storm
Dropped from the gloom of the sky!
I sit by my hearth-fire warm
And thrill to that purposeful cry.
Strong as a challenge sent out,
Rousing the timorous heart
To battle with fear and with doubt,
Courageously bearing its part.
14767
O birds in the wild, wild sky!
Would I could so follow God's way
Through darkness, unquestioning why,
With only one thought-to obey!


## p. 14768 (#342) ##########################################

14768
CELIA THAXTER
IN AUTUMN
HE aster by the brook is dead,
THE
And quenched the golden-rod's brief fire;
The maple's last red leaf is shed,
And dumb the birds' sweet choir.
'Tis life's November, too. How swift
The narrowing days speed, one by one!
How pale the waning sunbeams sift
Through clouds of gray and dun!
And as we lose our wistful hold
On warmth and loveliness and youth,
And shudder at the dark and cold,
Our souls cry out for Truth.
No more mirage, O Heavenly Powers,
To mock our sight with shows so fair!
We question of the solemn hours
That lead us swiftly- "Where ? »
We hunger for our lost - in vain!
We lift our close-clasped hands above,
And pray God's pity on our pain,
And trust the Eternal Love.


## p. 14769 (#343) ##########################################

14769
THEOCRITUS
(THIRD CENTURY B. C. )
BY J. W. MACKAIL
HE great age of Greek poetry had drawn to an end long
before the extinction of Greek freedom by the Macedonian
2 conquest. The epic, the lyric, and the drama had been suc-
cessively brought to perfection before the close of the period which
is famous in history as the age of Pericles. A century followed
in which intellectual interest was absorbed in the conquest of the
new and fascinating art of prose.
But an
age of great prose has to pay the price of
being prosaic. In the hundred years be-
tween Pericles and Alexander, poetry dried
up at its fountains, and became more and
more an academic art based on older mod-
els. Fifty years later, when prose itself had
been struck with the same academic lan-
guor, Greek poetry put forth its last and not
its least lovely and delicate blossom in the
pastorals of Theocritus.
The time was one of great learning
and refined luxury. Greek culture, following
the conquests of Alexander, had spread in
a broad shallow tide over the whole of the
countries fringing the Eastern Mediterranean. The wealth of the
East flowed into Europe through Egypt and Syria. At the other
end of the Greek world, the States of the larger Greece across the
seas were in fierce competition with Carthage for the control of the
immense commerce of Sicily. The guidance of public affairs had, in
the new epoch of trained professional armies, passed into the hands
small hierarchy of military administrators. Politics, for so
long the single absorbing passion of the Greek cities, were ceasing to
exist. Relieved from the long strain of political excitement, men's
minds fell back on Nature and Art as the two great springs of life.
They had hardly realized till then what treasures each had to offer;
nor perhaps is it easy for us to realize how entirely the life of an-
cient Greece is colored, to our eyes, by a sentiment which only arose
when that life was becoming absorbed in other forms. To see the
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beauty of nature afresh through a medium of enriched artistic tradi-
tion was the last task achieved by the Alexandrian poets; when, with
a pathetic insincerity, they turned back to the simple life they had
left so long behind, sought a new refinement in rusticity, and lavished
all their ornament on the portraiture of the plowmen, shepherds, or
fishermen, who were already well on their way towards becoming the
serf-population of the Roman Empire.
As to the life of Theocritus, the first and by far the most emi-
nent of the Greek pastoral poets, nothing is known beyond what may
be gathered from the allusions in his poems. He was a Syracusan by
birth. The idyls show intimate knowledge not only of Eastern Sicily,
but of the fringe of Greek States on the coast of southern Italy. But
his literary education was acquired, and a considerable part of his
life spent, at the court of Alexandria, which then, under the enlight-
ened despotism of Ptolemy II. , was the intellectual and artistic centre
of the Greek world. In later life he probably returned to Syracuse;
and the sixteenth idyl, addressed to King Hiero soon after his acces-
sion to the throne in B. C. 270, gives the only approximately certain
date among his poems. Before Hiero's long reign ended, the axis of
the world had shifted, and Ennius and Plautus were writing at Rome.
The poems, which have come down to us in substantial integ-
rity from a collection of the pastoral poets formed some fifty years
after the death of Theocritus,- while they vary much in subject and
manner, have a common quality which was well understood by the
critics who gave them the name of Idyllia. The name, which seems
to have been coined for this specific purpose, is a diminutive formed
from a word which, originally signifying visible form or shape, took
in later Greek (like its Latin equivalent species) the senses of physical
beauty, of particular form, and (by a curious late reversion from the
abstract to the concrete) of any rare and costly kind of merchandise,
-the sense preserved to the present day in the English word spices.
The book of idyls might be thought of, then, as a collection of select
masterpieces of workmanship on a small scale; a casket of finely
wrought jewels, one might say (like the "Émaux et Camées" of a
modern poet), or of spices remarkable for their rarity and richness.
They were sharply distinguished on the one hand, by their small
scale, from the larger traditional forms of poetry headed by the
epic; on the other by their lavish and intricate ornament, from the
class of minor poetry known as the epigram, the essence of which
was a studied and grave simplicity. The pastoral is only one form
out of several which the idyl may take; and in fact the Theocritean
idyls include, besides the pastorals, specimens of at least four other
manners: the epic idyl, in which a single incident or episode from
one of the heroic subjects is told separately and with great elabora-
tion; the dramatic idyl, in which the same method of treatment is


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applied to a scene from a comedy; the lyric idyl, where (as in Shake-
speare's sonnets) the poet speaks in his own person, but in the enriched
idyllic manner; and the occasional idyl, of which one charming speci-
men survives in the poem Theocritus wrote to go with the present of
an ivory spindle to his friend Theugenis,-the wife of a celebrated
physician of the time, and the happy mistress of one of those lovely
and peaceful Greek homes which gathered up in themselves all that
was best in the ancient world.
It is however on the pure pastoral that the main fame of The-
ocritus rests: and his shepherds, fishermen, and country girls, studied
directly from nature and yet moving in an atmosphere of highly
idealized art, have remained ever since the model for pastoral poets;
for his own successors in Greek poetry, for Virgil and the Latins, and
through Virgil for the literature of more modern Europe. To trace,
even in bare outline, the history of the pastoral since Theocritus,
would be out of place here; but it is important to remember that
Theocritus not only invented but perfected it, and that later varia-
tions on his method involved no substantial change,- with the excep-
tion of that unhappy craze for allegory from which Virgil is not
wholly free, and which deforms so much of the poetry of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries.
From this allegorical tendency the Greek temper - and Theocritus,
though a Sicilian writing in Egypt, is still a Greek was instinct-
ively averse. The Greek purity of line is as dominant in him as
in Homer or Sophocles; and it is this quality which gives the idyls
poetical value even when their subject is coarse or trifling. For
the full appreciation of what is meant by the Greek pastoral, the first
idyl, the Thyrsis,' may be taken as a canon. It includes in itself
the whole range of the idyllic feeling, in language whose movement
and grace are without a fault. Though it is the first known instance
of a pastoral poem, the "bucolic Muse" is spoken of as already a
familiar thing; and indeed long preparation must have been required
before the note struck in the first line-nay, in the first word—
could be struck with such clear certainty. "Sweet and low" (so we
may render the effect of that untranslatable opening cadence), the new
Muse, with flushed serious face and bright blown hair, comes from
the abandoned haunts of an older world in Thessaly or Arcadia; and
on the slopes of Ætna, among pine and oak, where the Dorian water
gushes through rocky lawns, finds a new and lovelier home. The
morning freshness of the mountains mingles with the clear sad vision
that she brings with her from older Greece. "To-morrow I will sing
to you still sweeter," are the last words of Thyrsis: so Greek poetry
might have said when yet in its youth; but the goatherd bids him
sing, with the melancholy encouragement, "since thou wilt not keep
a song where the Dark Realm brings forgetfulness. "
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This graver note however only comes as an undertone; while the
delicate beauty of the world to still unclouded senses fills the idyls
throughout. "Light and sweet," says Theocritus once of poetry in
his own person,-"light and sweet it is, but not easy to find. " More
especially is this so when the idyls touch on the deeper emotions.
In two instances Theocritus, keeping all the while this light sweet
touch, has given to love in two of its most intense phases an expres-
sion all but unequaled in the ancient world. The story of the fiery.
growth of love, told by the deserted girl of the second idyl all alone
in the flooding moonlight, still comes as fresh to us as a tale of
to-day; and even more remarkable is the strange half-mystical passion
of the twelfth idyl (called 'Aites,' or 'The Passionate Pilgrim' as we
might render the word into Elizabethan English), -with its extraor-
dinary likenesses in thought and expression to the Shakespearean
sonnets, and the sense throughout it, as in the sonnets, of the immor-
tality that verse alone gives.
These two poems are the type of one side of the Theocritean idyl;
the other, and one equally permanent in its truth and beauty, is
represented by the descriptive poems of country life, with their frank
realism and keen delight in simple country pleasures. In the stifling
streets of Alexandria, Theocritus must have turned back with a sort
of passion to the fresh hill-pastures he had known as a boy, with the
blue sea gleaming far down through the chestnut woods. There lay
his true home; and in one idyl, by a beautiful intricacy of imagina-
tion, he heightens the remembrance of a summer day spent in that
beautiful country-side by a dream of two wanderers,-one among
polar snows, one far among the rocks of the burning Soudan, where
the Nile lies sunk beyond the northern horizon. The songs of the
reapers in the eleventh idyl are genuine folk-poetry, such as was
already sung in Greek harvest-fields in the heroic age, and continues
to this day in the less sophisticated parts of modern Greece. The rus-
tic banter of the fourth, where the scene is in southern Italy, has in
it the germs not only of the artificial Latin eclogue, but of the provin-
cial comedy native to all parts of Italy. The fourteenth- even more
remarkable in its truth to nature-is, with all its poetical charm,
almost a literal transcript of a piece of that dull life of the Greek
peasant-proprietary which kept driving its young men into drink or
into the army; while the speech and manners of the same social class
in the great towns are drawn with as light and sure a touch in the
fifteenth idyl, the celebrated 'Adoniazusæ,'- the brilliant sketch of
the "bank holiday" spent by two Syracusan women settled in Alex-
andria.
Such was the external world in which Theocritus moved. The
inner world of his poetry, by which his final value has to be esti-
mated, can only reveal itself through the poems themselves; but a


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«<
few notes of his style may be pointed out to indicate his relation on
the one hand to the earlier Greek classics, on the other to a more
modern and romantic art. Amid all the richness of his ornament, it
retains the inimitable Greek simplicity,- that quality which so often
makes translations from the Greek seem bare and cold. But the
romantic sense of beauty, in which he is the precursor of Virgil
and the Latins, is something which on the whole is new: and new
too is a certain keenness of perception towards delicate or evanes-
cent phases of nature, shown sometimes in single phrases like the
sea-green dawn," in which he anticipates Shelley; sometimes in a
wonderfully expanded Tennysonian simile; and habitually in the
remarkable faculty of composition and selection which give a per-
ennial freshness and charm to his landscapes. And together with
this natural romanticism, as we may call it, is the literary romanti-
cism which he shares with the other Alexandrian poets. The idyls
addressed to Hiero and Ptolemy give a vivid picture of the position
which literature held at this period, in the enormously enlarged world
where "the rain from heaven makes the wheat-fields grow on ten
thousand continents. " Satiety had followed over-production: "Homer
is enough," became the cry of critics; and to many it seemed better
(in the phrase Tennyson borrowed from Theocritus) "to be born to
labor and the mattock-hardened hand” than to woo further the Muses,
who sat now "with heads sunk on chill nerveless knees. " To bring
a new flush into these worn faces; to renew, if but for a little, the
brightness of poetry and the joy of song; to kindle a light at which
Virgil should fire the torch for the world to follow,- this was the
achievement of Theocritus: nor is it without fitness that the bucolic
hexameter, the lovely and fragile metre of the idyls, should be a
modification of the same verse in which Homer had embodied the
morning glory of the Greek spirit. "With a backward look even
of five hundred courses of the sun," the idyls close, in lingering
cadences, the golden age of poetry which opened with the Iliad.
The selections which follow are chosen with the view of giving
the spirit of the idyls in its most heightened form. The 'Adoniazu-
sæ,' one of the most interesting and certainly the most unique in its
realism, is omitted, as easily accessible to modern readers in the essay
on 'Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment,' in Matthew Arnold's
'Essays in Criticism'; and a few of the most characteristic of the
Theocritean epigrams are added to show his mastery of a peculiarly
Greek form of poetry which is distinct from the idyllic.
J. W. Markal
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THEOCRITUS
THE SONG OF THYRSIS
EGIN, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!
B'
Thyrsis of Etna am I, and this is the voice of Thyrsis.
Where, ah! where were ye when Daphnis was languishing;
ye Nymphs, where were ye? By Peneus's beautiful dells, or by
dells of Pindus ? for surely ye dwelt not by the great stream of
the river Anapus, nor on the watch-tower of Ætna, nor by the
sacred water of Acis.
Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!
For him the jackals, for him the wolves did cry; for him
did even the lion out of the forest lament. Kine and bulls by
his feet right many, and heifers plenty, with the young calves,
bewailed him.
Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!
Came Hermes first from the hill, and said, "Daphnis, who is
it that torments thee; child, whom dost thou love with so great
desire? " The neatherds came, and the shepherds; the goatherds
came: all they asked what ailed him. Came also Priapus,—
Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!
And said: "Unhappy Daphnis, wherefore dost thou languish,
while for thee the maiden by all the fountains, through all the
glades, is fleeting in search of thee? Ah!