So the girls still sing in Greece, for though the Temples have fallen, and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of the god’s house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still to the old divinities in the shrines of the hearths of the peasants.  It is none of the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian shepherds of our time, ’Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee, what offering to the other world?  The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals of the rose.  I will send thee my tears shed on a napkin, and what though it burneth in the flame, if my tears reach thee at the last.’

Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on these shores beneath the sun, where thou didst wear a tawny skin stripped from the roughest of he-goats, and about thy breast an old cloak buckled with a plaited belt.  Thou wert happier there, in Sicily, methinks, and among vines and shadowy lime-trees of Cos, than in the dust, and heat, and noise of Alexandria.  What love of fame, what lust of gold tempted thee away from the red cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black water wreathed with maidenhair?

  The music of the rustic flute
  Kept not for long its happy country tone;
  Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note
  Of men contention tost, of men who groan,
  Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat—­
  It failed, and thou wast mute!

What hadst thou to make in cities, and what could Ptolemies and Princes give thee better than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean wine?  Thy Muses were meant to be the delight of peaceful men, not of tyrants and wealthy merchants, to whom they vainly went on a begging errand.  ’Who will open his door and gladly receive our Muses within his house, who is there that will not send them back again without a gift?  And they with naked feet and looks askance come homewards, and sorely they upbraid me when they have gone on a vain journey, and listless again in the bottom of their empty coffer they dwell with heads bowed over their chilly knees, where is their drear abode, when portionless they return.’  How far happier was the prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the fragrant cedar chest where the blunt-faced bees from the meadow fed him with food of tender flowers, because still the Muse dropped sweet nectar on his lips!

Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the galingale hummed over by the bees, and the pine that dropped her cones, and Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca with her feet of carven ivory.  Thou soughtest the City, and strife with other singers, and the learned write still on thy quarrels with Apollonius and Callimachus, and Antagoras of Rhodes.  So ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy, jealousy, and all unkindness.