rble columns and stately cities, of men august in single-heartedness
and strength and women comely and simple and superb as goddesses; and
with a music of leaves and winds and waters, of plunging ships and
clanging armours, of girls at song and kindly gods discoursing, the sunny-
eyed heroic age is revealed in all its nobleness, in all its majesty, its
candour, and its charm. The air is yet plangent with echoes of the
leaguer of Troy, and Odysseus the ready-at-need goes forth upon his
wanderings: into the cave of Polypheme, into the land of giants, into the
very regions of the dead: to hear among the olive trees the voice of
Circe, the sweet witch, singing her magic song as she fares to and fro
before her golden loom; to rest and pine in the islet of Calypso, the
kind sea-goddess; to meet with Nausicaa, loveliest of mortal maids; to
reach his Ithaca, and do battle with the Wooers, and age in peace and
honour by the side of the wise Penelope. The day is yet afar when, as he
sailed out to the sunset and the mysterious west,

Sol con un legno, e con quella compagna
Picciola, dalla qual non fue deserto,

the great wind rushed upon him from the new-discovered land, and so ended
his journeyings for ever; and all with him is energy and tact and valour
and resource, as becomes the captain of an indomitable human soul. His
society is like old d'Artagnan's: it invigorates, renews, inspires. I
had rather lack the friendship of the good Alonso Quijada himself than
the brave example of these two.

The Idylls.

With certain differences it is the same with our Theocritus. From him,
too, the mind is borne back to a 'happier age of gold,' when the world
was younger than now, and men were not so weary nor so jaded nor so
highly civilised as they choose to think themselves. Shepherds still
piped, and maidens still listened to their piping. The old gods had not
been discrowned and banished; and to fishers drawing their nets the
coasts yet kept a something of the trace of amorous Polypheme, the rocks
were peopled with memories of his plaint to Galatea. Inland, among the
dim and thymy woods, bee-haunted and populous with dreams of dryad and
oread, there were rumours of Pan; and dwellers under thatch--the goatherd
mending his sandals, the hind carving his new staff, the girls who busked
them for the vintaging--were conscious, as the wind went by among the
beeches and the pines, and brought with it the sounds of a lonely