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It is quite out of the question to claim Theocritus as a farm-writer; and yet in all old literature there is not to be found such a lively bevy of heifers, and wanton kids, and "butting rams," and stalwart herdsmen, who milk the cows "upon the sly," as in the "Idyls" of the musical Sicilian.
"My dear fellow, that is the best and wisest plan; these vague idyls ought to be hurried on, either to a painless separation or an honorable end in wedlock. In your place I should begin to-morrow." "Why not to-day?" "How so?" "Let's catch them up, and see her again at least." He began to laugh. "Run after young girls at my age! Well, well, it was my advice. Come along!"
An exact rendering of difficult English authors soon made Shakespeare's language in both prose and poetry as intelligible as German or French. After mastering the rules of grammar, I needed no teacher except my mother. When I had conquered the first difficulties I took up Tennyson's Idyls of the King, and at last succeeded in translating two of these beautiful poems in the metre of the original.
"Here are idyls, epics, dramas of human life, written in words that thrill and burn.... Each is a poem that has an immortal flavor. They are fragments of the author's early dreams, too bright, too gorgeous, too full of the blood of rubies and the life of diamonds to be caught and held palpitating in expression's grasp." Boston Courier.
>From this point the sea appears as a vast poem, "one of those charming idyls in which no element of beauty or power is lacking." From this rough pulpit of masonry we gazed at the booming breakers rolling in with their crests of gleaming silver, that were shattered to fragments immediately below us. Their long sprays of phosphorescent blossoms vanished like stars in the golden light of dawn.
In the epic idyls, as in the Hymn to the Dioscuri, and in the two poems on Heracles, he was writing to please the taste of Alexandria. He was to add minute pictorial touches, as in the description of Alcmena's waking when the serpents attacked her child, a passage rich in domestic pathos and incident which contrast strongly with Pindar's bare narrative of the same events.
The role you have given him is inappropriate. To ask of him to play the repentant sinner, is simply ridiculous. Count Podstadsky is a gentleman, and has no taste for idyls." "Who is this woman?" asked the old countess. Her son had regained all his self-possession again. He approached Arabella, and, taking her hand, led her directly up to his mother.
For while the shepherds watched Theocritus dreamed the immortal sheep and goats which tempt us for an instant to become shepherds; but Owen knew that the real flocks would seem unreal to him who knew the visionary ones, so he turned away from the coasts without a desire in his heart to trouble the shepherds in the valley with an offer of his services, and walked up and down the deck thinking how he might obtain a translation of the idyls.
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, and Longfellow have left for us such historical paintings as the Iliad, Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Idyls of a King, Miles Standish, etc. Some of the best historians also have described such epochs of history in scarcely less attractive form.
He was fond of taking long, leisurely drives and rides through the rich and varied hill country about Peterboro, and many of the impressions that were then garnered and stored have found issue in some of his most intimate and affecting music as in the "Woodland Sketches" and "New England Idyls."
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