eat arch of the sky a sea of light
so full and splendid that it seems almost to dim the fiery effluence of
the sun itself. In such an hour one stretches himself under the trees,
and in a moment the spell is on him, and he cares neither to think nor
act; he rejoices to lose himself in the universal repose with which
Nature refreshes herself. The heat of the day is at its height, but
for an hour the burden slips from the shoulders of care, and the rest
comes in which the gains of work are garnered.

The whir of the locust high overhead, by some earlier association,
always recalls that matchless singer, some of whose notes Nature has
never regained in all these later years. The whir of the cicada and
the white light on the remote country road are real to us today, though
one went silent and the other faded out of Sicilian skies two thousand
years and more ago, because both are preserved in the verse of
Theocritus. The poet was something more than a mere observer of
Nature, and the beautiful repose of his art more than the native grace
and ease of one to whom life meant nothing more strenuous than a dream
of a blue sea and fair sky. He had known the din of the crowded street
as well as the silence of the country road, the forms and shows of a
royal court as well as the simplicity and sincerity of tangled vines
and gnarled olives on the hillside. He had seen, with those eyes which
overlooked nothing, the pomps and vanities of power, the fret and fever
of ambition, the impotence and barrenness of much of that activity in
which multitudes of men spend their lives under the delusion that mere
stir and bustle mean progress and achievement. Out of Syracuse, with
its petty court about a petty tyrant, Theocritus had come back to the
sea and the sky and the hardy pastoral life with a joy which touches
some of his lines with penetrating tenderness. Better a thousand times
for him and for us the long, tranquil days under the pine and the olive
than a great position under Hiero's hand and the weary intrigue and
activity which made the melancholy semblance of a successful life for
men less wise and genuine. The lines which the hand of Theocritus has
left on the past are few and marvellously delicate, but they seem to
gain distinctness from the remorseless years that have almost
obliterated the features of the age in which he lived. It is better to
see clearly one or two things in life than to move confused and blinded
in the d