mold of brass in which for
centuries Italian and English pastorals were cast, and later to the
complete devitalizing which marks English pastoral poetry in the
eighteenth century, with the one exception of Allan Ramsay's "Gentle
Shepherd". Theocritus had sung with genuine feeling of trees and
wandering winds, of flowers and the swift mountain stream. His poetry
has atmosphere; it is vital with sunlight, color, and the beauty which
is cool and calm and true. Although Bion's poems possess elegance and
sweetness, and abound in pleasing imagery, they lack the naturalness of
the idyls of Theocritus. Reflection has crept into them; they are in
fact love-songs, with here and there a tinge of philosophy,

The most famous as well as the most powerful and original of Bion's
poems remaining to us is the threnody upon Adonis. It was doubtless
composed in honor of the rites with which Greek women celebrated certain
Eastern festivals; for the worship of Adonis still lingered among them,
mixed with certain Syrian customs.

"Thammuz came next behind,
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer's day,
While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded."

Thammuz is identified with Adonis. "We came to a fair large river,"
writes an old English traveler, "doubtless the ancient river Adonis,
which at certain seasons of the year, especially about the feast of
Adonis, is of a bloody color, which the heathens looked upon as
proceeding from a kind of sympathy in the river for the death of Adonis,
who was killed by a wild boar in the mountains out of which the stream
issues. Something like this we saw actually come to pass; for the water
was stained to a surprising redness, and, as we observed in traveling,
had discolored the sea a great way into a reddish hue, occasioned
doubtless by a sort of minium, or red earth, washed into the river by
the violence of the rain."

The poem is colored by the Eastern nature of its subject, and its
rapidity, vehemence, warmth, and unrestraint are greater than the strict
canon of Greek art allows. It is noteworthy, aside from its varied
beauties, because of its fine abandonment to grief and its appeal for
recognition of the merits of the dead youth it celebrates. Bion's
threnody has undoubtedly become a criterion and given the form to s