"What time from heaven the bright glad morn coming up from the East begins to shine, and path and road are all agleam, and the dew-bespangled plains are flashing with the radiant light."
How vivid too, and with the vividness of modern poetry, are his descriptions of the cave of Hades and its neighbourhood (ii. 729-750), and the Great Syrtis (iv. 1230-1245)! In his selections from the Greek Anthology Mr. Palgrave is much happier; but here again he has many omissions, and among them the most remarkable illustration of Greek nature-painting to be found in that collection—namely, Meleager's idyll giving an elaborate description of a spring day, which might have been written by Thomson (Pal. Anthology, ix. 363). It may be observed in passing that ουρεσιφοιτα κρινα (Pal. Anth., v. 144) can hardly mean "lilies that wander over the hills," but lilies "that haunt the hills," and that ξουθαι μελισσαι in Theocritus, vii. 142, probably means "buzzing" bees, not "tawny."
In dealing with the Roman poets Mr. Palgrave is, with one exception, most unsatisfactory. From the poets preceding Lucretius, amply as the fragments would serve his purpose, he gives only one illustration. We should have expected the vivid picture given by Accius in his Œnomaus of the early morning:
"Forte ante Auroram, radiorum ardentum indicem,
Cum e somno in segetem agrestis cornutos cient,
Ut rorulentas terras ferro rufidas
Proscindant, glebasque arvo ex molli exsuscitent."
"Perchance before the dawn that heralds the burning rays, what time rustics bring forth the oxen from their sleep into the cornfields, to break up the red dew-spangled soil with the ploughshare, and turn up the clods from the soft soil";
or the wonderfully graphic description of a sudden storm at sea, in the fragments of the Dulorestes of Pacuvius:
"Profectione læti piscium lasciviam