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It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art?
Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect always something large and public in their way of life, something more or less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We should not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however beautiful.
This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of a younger day. Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see. Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.
The name of Idyls, however, was afterwards applicable to pastoral poems.
At times Cameron caught through the tent walls snatches of those songs and yarns and idyls, at times he caught momentary glimpses of the bright young girl who was pouring the vigour of her life into the lad fighting for his own, but these snatches and glimpses only exasperated him.
Of the "Sea Pieces" those he liked best were: "To the Sea," "From the Depths," "In Mid-Ocean"; of the "Fireside Tales": the "Haunted House," "Salamander," "'Brer Rabbit"; and he had a tender feeling for "In a German Forest," which always seemed to bring back the Frankfort days to his memory. Of the "New England Idyls," his favorites were: "In Deep Woods," "Mid-Winter," "From a Log Cabin."
There are several of these intermitting springs in different parts of the world, and they are perhaps all to be explained on the principle of the siphon. In the Idyls of Theocritus there are frequent allusions to springs. It was at a spring and a mountain spring at that that Castor and Pollux encountered the plug-ugly Amycus:
The departure for Cythera! exclaims Watteau; Lancret, the painter of plebeians, contemplates his bourgeois, who have flitted away into the azure sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these love idyls, and d'Urfe mingles druids with them.
Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his Idyls of the King, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others.
Alas! they were passed away, those days of festivity, those innocent joys of Trianon; the royal farmer's wife had no more the heart to carry the spindle, to gather eggs from the hens' nests, and to perform with her friends the joyous idyls of a pastoral life.
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