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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Strangely love the man, who, when his soldiers lay benumbed under the snows on the heights of Armenia, threw off his general's coat, or blanket, or what not, and set himself resolutely to wood-chopping and to cheering them. The farmer knew how. Such men win battles. He has his joke, too, with Cheinsophus, the Lacedaemonian, about the thieving propensity of his townspeople, and invites him, in virtue of it, to steal a difficult march upon the enemy. And Cheirisophus grimly retorts upon Xenophon, that Athenians are said to be great experts in stealing the public money, especially the high officers. This sounds home-like! When I come upon such things, — by Jupiter! — I forget the parasangs and the Taochians and the dead Cyrus, and seem to be reading out of American newspapers. Theocritus and Lesser Poets. TT is quite out of the question to claim Theocritus as -- a farm-writer; and yet in all old literature there is not to be found such a lively bevy of heifers, and wanton kids, and " butting rams," and stalwart herdsmen, who milk the cows " upon the sly," as in the " Idyls " of the musical Sicilian. There is no doubt but Theocritus knew the country to a charm: he knew all its roughnesses, and the thorns that scratched the bare legs of the goatherds; heknew the lank heifers, that fed, " like grasshoppers," only on dew; he knew what clatter the brooks made, tumbling headlong adown the rocks ; he knew, moreover, all the charms and coyness of the country- nymphs, giving even a rural twist to his praises of the courtly Helen: — " In shape, in height, in stately presence fair, Straight as a furrow gliding from the share." t A man must have had an eye for good ploughing and a lithe figure, as well as a keen scent for the odor of fresh-turned earth, to make such a comparison...
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
