k-paced night,
And in the morn ten fawns I feed for you,
And four young bears: O rise from grots below,
Soft love and peace with me forever know!

Last night I dreamed that I, a monster gilled,
Swam in the sea and saw you singing there:
I gave you lilies and your grotto filled
With the sweet odours of all flowers rare;
I gave you apples, as I kissed your hand,
And reddest poppies from my richest land.

Oh, brave the restless billows of your world:
They toss and tremble; see my cypress-grove,
And bending laurels, and the tendrils curled
Of honeyed grapes, and a fresh treasure-trove
In vine-crowned AEtna, of pure-running rills!
O Galatea, kill the scorn that kills!

Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds,
O Galatea, listen to my prayer:
Come, come to land, and hear the song of birds;
Rise, rise, from ocean-depths, as lily-fair
As you are in my dreams! Come, then, O Sleep,
For you alone can bring her from the deep.

And Galatea, in her cool, green waves,
Plaits her long hair with purple flower-bells,
And laughs and sings, while black-browed Cyclops raves
And to the wind his love-lorn story tells:
For well she knows that Cyclops will ere long
Forget, as poets do, his pain in song.

No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus, even when interpreted in
English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan
in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and
swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this
delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a
degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an
extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested
against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of
the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all
silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the
Sicilian poets did not entice us to hear their echoes.

But to how many links of a long chain does Maurice de Gu['e]rin lead us!
Here is another link--Jos['e] de Her['e]dia, and his jewelled and chiselled
sonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines
the essential meanings of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."

_Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre m[^e]me s'use.
Argrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et