he shepherd-boy singing light-heartedly upon the
headland a song of sweet days and little eager joys, comes into my heart
like wine, and brings a sharp touch of tears into the eyes. Theocritus!
How little I thought, as I read the ugly brown volume with its yellow
paper, in the dusty schoolroom at Eton ten years before, that it was
going to mean that to me, sweetly as even then, in a moment torn from
the noisy tide of schoolboy life, came the pretty echoes of the song
into a little fanciful and restless mind! But now, as I saw those
deserted limestone crags, that endless sheep-wold, with no sign of a
habitation, rising and falling far into the distance, with the fresh
sea-breeze upon my cheek--there came upon me that tender sorrow for all
the beautiful days that are dead, the days when the shepherds walked
together, exulting in youth and warmth and good-fellowship and song, to
the village festival, and met the wandering minstrel, with his coat of
skin and his kind, ironical smile, who gave them, after their halting
lays, a touch of the old true melody from a master's hand. What do all
those old and sweet dreams mean for me, the sunlight that breaks on the
stream of human souls, flowing all together, alike through dark rocks
where the water chafes and thunders, and spreading out into tranquil
shining reaches, where the herons stand half asleep? What does that
strange drift of kindred spirits, moving from the unknown to the
unknown, mean for me? I only know that it brings into my mind a strange
yearning, and a desire of almost unearthly sweetness for all that is
delicate and beautiful and full of charm, together with a sombre pity
for the falling mist of tears, the hard discipline of the world, the
cries of anguish, as life lapses from the steep into the silent tide of
death.

Or, again, I seem once more to sit in the balcony of a house that looks
out towards Vesuvius. It is late; the sky is clouded, the air is still;
a grateful coolness comes up from acre after acre of gardens climbing
the steep slope; a fluttering breeze, that seems to have lost his way
in the dusk, comes timidly and whimsically past, like Ariel, singing
as soft as a far-off falling sea in the great pine overhead, making a
little sudden flutter in the dry leaves of the thick creeper; like Ariel
comes that dainty spirit of the air, laden with balmy scents and cool
dew. A few lights twinkle in the plain below. Opposite, the sky has an
added blackness, an i