Syracuse
Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent;_

_Et seul le dur m['e]tal que l'amour fit docile
Garde encore en sa fleur, aux m['e]dailles d'argent,
L'immortelle beaut['e] des vierges de Sicile."_

A translation of which reads:

Time goes; all dies; marble itself decays;
A shadow Agrigentum; Syracuse
Sleeps, still in death, beneath her kind sky's shades;
But the hard metal guards through all the days,
Silver grown docile unto love's own use,
The immortal beauty of Sicilian maids.

I always felt that Dante would have been less devoted to Virgil had he
known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his
rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan
poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of
Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his
sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the
heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads
Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too
paraphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends
_enrag['e]_ of the "Classics," honestly despise me for making this
confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without
even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin
a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed
thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted
prairie.

_Dante_

A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He may
find them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader is
dead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famous
tournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman he
once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between two
conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told.
"A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of
reading, and, as for the good old books--nobody reads them any more." On
the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous
books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the
windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."

Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, the
winter is the time for reading--I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's
"Winter Hour" when I