frith, "and Skalm went on till they came
off the heath south to Borgfrith, where two red sand-dunes were, and
there she lay down under the pack below the outermost sand-well."
There the son of Grim set up his rest. There will nevermore be room in
the world for things like that, but it is pleasant to know of them,

"WORKS AND DAYS"

Some time or another, Apollo my helper, I would choose to write a new
_Works and Days_ wherein the land-lore of our own Boeotia should be
recorded and enshrined for a season. There should be less practice
than Tusser gives you, less art than the _Georgics_, but rather more
of each than Hesiod finds occasion for. Though it is long since I read
the _Georgics_, I seem to remember that the poem was overloaded
with spicy merchandise. You might die of it in aromatic pain. As for
Tusser, certainly he is the complete Elizabethan farmer; sooner than
leave anything out he will say it twice; sooner than say it twice, he
will say it three times. Nevertheless he was a good farmer; as poet,
his itch to be quaint and anxiety to find a rhyme combine to make him
difficult. He writes like Old Moore:

Strong yoke for a hog, with a twitcher and rings,
With tar in a tarpot, for dangerous things;
A sheep-mark, a tar-kettle, little or mitch,
Two pottles of tar to a pottle of pitch.

"Mitch" is a desperate rhyme, but nothing to Tusser. He gives you a
league or more of that; all the same, I don't doubt he was a better
farmer than Virgil. More of him anon.

Hesiod also was a better farmer than Virgil, and a poet into the
bargain, though the Mantuan had him there. He prefers terseness to
eloquence, is on the dry side, and avoids ornament as if he was a
Quaker. Such adjectives as he allows himself are Homer's, well-worn
and familiar. The sea is _atrugetos_, Zeus _hypsibremetes_, the earth
_polyboteire_, the hawk _tanysipteros_, and so on. They have no more
effect upon you than the egg-and-dart mouldings on your cornices. His
own tropes are more curious than beautiful, but I cannot deny
their charm. The spring, with him, is always _gray_--[Greek: polion
ear]--which is exact for the moment when the breaking leaf-buds are no
more than a mist over the woodlands. You shall begin your harvesting--

When the House-carrier shuns the Pleiades,
And climbs the stalks to get a little ease.

The House-carrier is the snail, of course; and he shuns the heat of
the ground, not the Pleiades. Here again is a