XIV INTRODUCTION. 



And I listen and forget 



All the thorns, the doubts and fears, 



Love in a lover's heart may set ; 



Listen and forget them all, 



And so, with music in mine ears. 



When the plane tree shadows steep 



The ground with freshness, gently fall 



Into a noontide sleep." — W. A. 



Before dismissing this part of my subject, which 

 some perhaps may think ah-eady too prohx, I will add 

 some interesting notes kindly furnished by Mr. Edmund 

 Gosse. They must have involved some research on 

 his part. On the title-page of this volume is inscribed 

 an epigram of four lines made by the poetess Anyte, 

 of Tegea, who wrote about three hundred years before 

 our era. 



In this early time Grreek ladies, cotemporaries 

 perhaps of the cruel Medea, seem nevertheless to 

 have found room for sympathy with their pets. Mr. 

 Gosse kindly gives me the following prose translation 

 of these lines : — 



" The Epigram of Anyte. 

 *' For a grass-hopper, the nightingale of the fields, and for an oak- 

 dwelling Cicada, Myro hath built a common tomb : there the maiden 

 lets fall her virgin -tears, since relentless Hades hath torn both her pets 

 from her ! " 



There is a late imitation of this by Pamphilos, about 

 a Tettix which was thoughtlessly killed by the hand of 

 a child, beginning, " OvKsn ^h xj^^wporajv," &c. 



A beautiful and ingenious little lyric is extant, by 

 Archias of Antioch ('2nd century e.g.), about a Tettix 

 that, seated on a branch of a pine, was singing to the 

 shepherds, striking its feet against its sides, when it 

 was killed by ants. The poet consoles it by comparing 

 its fate to that of Masonides himself! "nfiv ixh km. 



X>^upo7i," &C. 



Another Byzantine Greek, Marcus Argentarius, has 

 an epigram on Myro and her monument to the Tettix, 

 imitated from Anyte, whose poem seems to have been 

 the general model for such effusions. Antipater, of 

 Thessalonica, says the dew is enough to intoxicate 



