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Close by the stir of the great city, with all its fret and chafe and storm of life, in the desolate garden of that sombre house, and under the withering eyes of relentless Crime, revived the Arcady of old, the scene vocal to the reeds of idyllist and shepherd; and in the midst of the iron Tragedy, harmlessly and unconsciously arose the strain of the Pastoral Music.

The Alexandrian vignettes of the gentle Theocritus may be regarded as anticipations of the modern short-story of urban local color; but this delicate idyllist used verse for the talk of his Tanagra figurines.

He suggests that the vagaries of the Theocritan dialect are due to the fact that the Idyllist was a foreigner, whose native language was "probably Hebrew or Syriac." Or perhaps Theocritus used the Greek translation of the Song, "unless Theocritus himself was the translator."

While most of those who have accepted the theory of imitation-they cannot have reread the Idylls and the Song as wholes to persist in such a theory-have contended that Theocritus borrowed from Canticles, Graetz is convinced that the Hebrew poet must have known and imitated the Greek idyllist.

Close by the stir of the great city, with all its fret and chafe and storm of life, in the desolate garden of that sombre house, and under the withering eyes of relentless Crime, revived the Arcady of old, the scene vocal to the reeds of idyllist and shepherd; and in the midst of the iron Tragedy, harmlessly and unconsciously arose the strain of the Pastoral Music.

Had he written only "Faust," he would be the first of philosophic poets. Had he written only "Hermann and Dorothea," the sweetest idyllist; if only the "Märchen," the subtlest of allegorists. Had he written never a verse, but only prose, he would hold the highest place among the prose-writers of Germany.

From the mean squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the idyllist may soar on poesy's viewless wings, may traverse with fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithaeron though Faun and Bassarid dance there no more.

The Alexandrian vignettes of the gentle Theocritus may be regarded as anticipations of the modern short-story of urban local color; but this delicate idyllist used verse for the talk of his Tanagra figurines.