When the wind on the grey salt sea blows softly, then my weary spirits rise, and the land no longer pleases me, and far more doth the calm allure me. {208} But when the hoary deep is roaring, and the sea is broken up in foam, and the waves rage high, then lift I mine eyes unto the earth and trees, and fly the sea, and the land is welcome, and the shady wood well pleasing in my sight, where even if the wind blow high the pine-tree sings her song. Surely an evil life lives the fisherman, whose home is his ship, and his labours are in the sea, and fishes thereof are his wandering spoil. Nay, sweet to me is sleep beneath the broad-leaved plane-tree; let me love to listen to the murmur of the brook hard by, soothing, not troubling the husbandman with its sound.

IDYL VI

Pan loved his neighbour Echo; Echo loved A gamesome Satyr; he, by her unmoved, Loved only Lyde; thus through Echo, Pan, Lyde, and Satyr, Love his circle ran. Thus all, while their true lovers' hearts they grieved, Were scorned in turn, and what they gave received. O all Love's scorners, learn this lesson true; Be kind to Love, that he be kind to you.

IDYL VII

Alpheus, when he leaves Pisa and makes his way through beneath the deep, travels on to Arethusa with his waters that the wild olives drank, bearing her bridal gifts, fair leaves and flowers and sacred soil. Deep in the waves he plunges, and runs beneath the sea, and the salt water mingles not with the sweet. Nought knows the sea as the river journeys through. Thus hath the knavish boy, the maker of mischief, the teacher of strange ways--thus hath Love by his spell taught even a river to dive.

IDYL VIII

Leaving his torch and his arrows, a wallet strung on his back, One day came the mischievous Love-god to follow the plough-share's track: And he chose him a staff for his driving, and yoked him a sturdy steer, And sowed in the furrows the grain to the Mother of Earth most dear. Then he said, looking up to the sky: 'Father Zeus, to my harvest be good, Lest I yoke that bull to my plough that Europa once rode through the flood!'

IDYL IX

Would that my father had taught me the craft of a keeper of sheep, For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks on the steep, Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to sleep. {210}

Footnotes

{0a} This fragment is from the collection of M. Fauriel; Chants Populaires de le Grece.

{0b} Empedocles on Etna.

{0c} Ballet des Arts, danse par sa Majeste; le 8 janvier, 1663. A Paris, par Robert Ballard, MDCLXIII.

{0d} These and the following ditties are from the modern Greek ballads collected by MM. Fauriel and Legrand.

{0e} See Couat, La Poesie Alexandrine, p. 68 et seq., Paris 1882.

{0f} See Couat, op. cit. p. 395.

{0g} Couat, p. 434.

{0h} See Helbig, Campenische Wandmalerie, and Brunn, Die griechischen Bukoliker und die Bildende Kunst.

{0i} The Hecale of Callimachus, or Theseus and the Marathonian Bull, seems to have been rather a heroic idyl than an epic.