heocritus, where he hymns the children
of Leda, succourers of the ships that, "defying the stars that set and
rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms. The
winds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, or
even as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, and
shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confused
and broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and by
showers of iron hail."

I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in
words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the
imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here
I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it.
Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at times
from the hills and the campagna. Descending under the high peak of
Capri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes
the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then the
centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world's morning
notes. That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. I
read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in.
The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet with
wherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems.
It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded
forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or
dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The run
that comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon
branches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the
mill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying on
the campagna in the meadows, and that further _fiume freddo_, the cold
stream,--"chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the
white snow, a draught divine,"--each of these seems inhabited by a
genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. But all
alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real.

On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls,
and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. No
idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that of
the two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. Go down to the
shore; you