94 UNDER THE TREES. 



shoulders of care, and the rest comes in which the 

 gains of work are garnered. 



The whir of the locust high overhead, by some 

 earlier association, always recalls that matchless 

 singer, some of whose notes Nature has never 

 regained in all these later years. The whir of the 

 cicada and the white light on the remote country 

 road are real to us to-day, though one went silent 

 and the other faded out of Sicilian skies two thou 

 sand years and more ago, because both are pre 

 served in the verse of Theocritus. The poet was 

 something more than a mere observer of Nature, 

 and the beautiful repose of his art more than the 

 native grace and ease of one to whom life meant 

 nothing more strenuous than a dream of a blue sea 

 and fair sky. He had known the din of the 

 crowded street as well as the silence of the country 

 road, the forms and shows of a royal court as well 

 as the simplicity and sincerity of tangled vines and 

 gnarled olives on the hillside. He had seen, with 

 those eyes which overlooked nothing, the pomps 

 and vanities of power, the fret and fever of 

 ambition, the impotence and barrenness of much of 

 that activity in which multitudes of men spend their 

 lives under the delusion that mere stir and bustle 

 mean progress and achievement. Out of Syracuse, 

 with its petty court about a petty tyrant, Theocri 

 tus had come back to the sea and the sky and the 

 hardy pastoral life with a joy which touches some 

 of his lines with penetrating tenderness. Better a 



