'The dewdrop that hangs from the rowan bough
Is fine as the proudest rose can show.'
Leyden was a shepherd, too, who wrote the 'Mermaid' that I read you the other day; and Burns was a farmer's boy. What wonderful people the Scots are!"
"On the whole," said Rose, after a pause, "perhaps it isn't so strange for a shepherd to be a poet. They sit all day out in the fields all alone with the sky and the sheep and the trees and flowers. One can imagine how the beauty and the stillness would sink into his heart, and turn into music and lovely words there. No one ever heard of a butcher-poet or a baker-poet—at least, I never did!—but a shepherd! There was the Shepherd Lord, too, that you told me about, and the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, in a funny little old book that Father had; by Hannah More, I think it was. And wasn't there a shepherd painter?"
"Of course! Giotto!" cried Hildegarde. "He was only ten years old when Cimabue found him drawing a sheep on a smooth stone."
"It was in one of my school-readers," said Rose. "Only the teacher called him Guy Otto, and I supposed it was a contraction of the two names, for convenience in printing. Then," she added, after a moment, "there was David, when he was 'ruddy, and of a beautiful countenance.'"
"And Apollo," cried Hildegarde, "when he kept the flocks of Admetus, you know."
"I don't know!" said Rose. "I thought Apollo was the god of the sun."
"So he was!" replied Hildegarde. "But Jupiter was once angry with him, and banished him from Olympus. His sun-chariot was sent round the sky as usual, but empty; and he, poor dear, without his golden rays, came down to earth, and hired himself as a shepherd to King Admetus of Thessaly. All the other shepherds were very wild and savage, but Apollo played to them on his lyre, and sang of all the beautiful things in the world,—of spring, and the young grass, and the birds, and—oh! everything lovely. So at last he made them gentle, like himself, and taught them to sing, and play on the flute, and to love their life and the beautiful world they lived in. And so shepherds became the happiest people in the world, and the most skilful in playing and singing, and in shooting with bow and arrows, which the god also taught them; till at last the gods were jealous, and called Apollo back to Olympus. Isn't it a pretty story? I read it in 'Télémaque,' at school last winter."
"Lovely!" said Rose. "Yes, I think I should like to be a shepherd." And straightway she fell into a reverie, this foolish Rose, and fancied herself wrapped in a plaid, lying in a broad meadow, spread with heather as with a mantle, and here and there gray rocks, and sheep moving slowly about nibbling the heather.
And as Hildegarde watched her pure sweet face, and saw it soften into dreamy languor and then kindle again with some bright thought, another poem of the Ettrick Shepherd came to her mind, and she repeated the opening lines, half to herself:—