Give o’er, ye Muses, come, give o’er the pastoral song!
“Now violets bear, ye brambles, ye thorns bear violets and let fair narcissus bloom on the boughs of juniper! Let all things with all be confounded—from pines let men gather pears, for Daphnis is dying! Let the stag drag down the hounds, let owls from the hills contend in song with the nightingales.”
Give o’er, ye Muses, come, give o’er the pastoral song!
So Daphnis spake, and ended; but fain would Aphrodite have given him back to life. Nay, spun was all the thread that the Fates assigned, and Daphnis went down the stream. The whirling wave closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the nymphs.
Give o’er, ye Muses, come, give o’er the pastoral song!
And thou, give me the bowl, and the she-goat, that I may milk her and pour forth a libation to the Muses. Farewell, oh, farewells manifold, ye Muses, and I, some future day, will sing you yet a sweeter song.
The Goatherd. Filled may thy fair mouth be with honey, Thyrsis, and filled with the honeycomb; and the sweet dried fig mayest thou eat of Ægilus, for thou vanquishest the cicala in song! Lo, here is thy cup, see, my friend, of how pleasant a savour! Thou wilt think it has been dipped in the well-spring of the Hours. Hither, hither, Cissætha: do thou milk her, Thyrsis. And you young she-goats, wanton not so wildly lest you bring up the he-goat against you.
“What a crowded place Sicily is!” cried Jane, heaving an oppressed breath.
“Isn’t it?” sympathized Peripatetica. “Here we are on our way to the very fountain, as it seems, of history—Syracuse, where nearly everything happened that ever did happen, and yet one has to mentally push one’s way through a swarming crowd of events to get there, because almost everything that didn’t happen in Syracuse occurred in these Sicilian plains. When you think of the layer on layer of human life, like geologic strata, that lies all over this place, you realize that it would take half a lifetime to come to some understanding of the significance of it all, and that it’s foolish to go on until one can get some hold upon the meaning of what lies right here.”