A HAPPY FAMILY. 
61 
his whole support during his bold migrations over path¬ 
less wilds. His great anxiety was to find a succession of 
“fresh fields and pastures new;” and the sheep and 
goats were the real founders of the earliest states and 
dynasties. In the records of later ages the shepherd has 
ever a high place. And though in the old chivalric nar¬ 
ratives the horse is the subject of many a splendid apos¬ 
trophe, the domestic life of antiquity finds its truest 
utterance in the associations that attach to flocks and 
herds; for the shepherd was always the predecessor of 
the husbandman, or the builder of cities. The earliest 
and the latest pastoral equally derive freshness from the 
presence of the mountain goat. Longus, the first and 
most tender writer of pastorals, reaches his highest ex¬ 
cellence where he paints the foundlings, Daphnis and 
Chloe, feeding their flocks together, and at the same time 
learning to love. Theocritus, the true cottage-poet of 
antiquity, gives us the most homely and rustic pictures 
ever sketched in pastoral verse; and in every group he 
places the goat in the foreground to suggest the flowery 
hills and knolls of wild thyme, amongst which his shep¬ 
herds breathe fragrant air in the tendance of their 
flocks. Horace, thoroughly proud of his garden, was 
too much of a parlour-poet, and too much addicted to 
the shadow of Mecsenas, to cultivate the truly rustic. 
But see what Yirgil did in his highly polished pastorals 
and the graphic “ Georgies ” in honour of the jaunty, 
self-willed, strong-limbed, but tameable and affectionate 
Capricornus; and when John Keats shook the dust of the 
grave from the inner life of Greece, and rekindled the flame 
on the altar of Pagan worship, the shadowy pomp of 
