ghed and measured.
Often is he, too, of this and that a poet!
Every case declines with precisest conscience;
Knows the history of Church and State, together--
Every Churchly light,--of pedant-deeds the record.
All the village world speechless stands before him.
Asking "How can _one_ brain be so ruled by Wisdom?"
Sharply, too, he looks down on one's transgressions.
'Gainst his judgment stern, tears and prayers avail not.
He appears--one glance (from a god that glance comes!)
At a flash decides what the youngster's fate is.
At his will a crowd runs, at his beck it parteth.
Doth he smile? all frolic; doth he frown--all cower.
By a tone he threatens, gives rewards, metes justice.
Absent though he be, every pupil dreads him,
For he sees, hears, knows, everything that's doing.
On the urchin's forehead he can see it written.
He divines who laughs, idles, yawns, or chatters,
Who plays tricks on others, or in prayer-time's lazy.
With its shoots, the birch-rod lying there beside him
Knows how all misdeeds in a trice are settled.
Surely by these traits you've our dorf-Dionysius!

[Footnote 17: Compare Goldsmith's famous portrait in
"The Deserted Village".]

Translation through the German, in the meter of the original, by E.
Irenaetis Stevenson, for the "World's Best Literature".

BION

(275 B.C.)

Of Bion, the second of the Sicilian idyllists, of whom Theocritus was
the first and Moschus the third and last, but little knowledge and few
remains exist. He was born near Smyrna, says Suidas; and from the elegy
on his death, attributed to his pupil Moschus, we infer that he lived in
Sicily and died there of poison. "Say that Bion the herdsman is dead,"
says the threnody, appealing to the Sicilian muses, "and that song has
died with Bion, and the Dorian minstrelsy hath perished.... Poison came,
Bion, to thy mouth. What mortal so cruel as to mix poison for thee!" As
Theocritus is also mentioned in the idyl, Bion is supposed to have been
his contemporary, and to have flourished about 275 B. C.

Compared with Theocritus, his poetry is inferior in simplicity and
naivete, and declines from the type which Theocritus had established for
the out-door, open-field idyl. With Bion, bucolics first took on the air
of the study. Although at first this art and affectation were rarely
discernible, they finally led to the