But a fresher delight is to be found in the foot-paths, which go wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idyls and eclogues.

The swineherd is never introduced into the idyls of Theocritus, nor has Virgil admitted him into his eclogues.

Entirely different in spirit is another collection of poems called English Idyls, which began in the Poems of 1842, and which Tennyson intended should reflect the ideals of widely different types of English life.

(See Selections for Reading, at the end of this chapter.) Footnote 236: Tennyson made a distinction in spelling between the Idylls of the King, and the English Idyls, like "Dora." Footnote 237: An excellent little book for the beginner is Lovett's Selections from Browning.

When a class has neither the right to complain, nor to defend itself, nor to testify in law; when it cannot make its voice heard in any manner, we may be excused for not taking in earnest the idyls chanted on its felicity.

Patriotism can only be a crime in a tyrannical people, because then it is rapine under a beautiful name, but however perfect humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among oppressed peoples, because it will at all times mean love of justice, of liberty, of personal dignitynothing of chimerical dreams, of effeminate idyls!

GERAINT AND ENID [Footnote 1: Tennyson, in his collection of poems known as the Idyls of the King worked up in beautiful form many of the legends which had grown up around the names of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table Geraint and Enid is one of the most popular of these.]

Yearly did hill- and lake-side Their summer idyls frame; Alone in his darkened dwelling, He hid his face for shame.

Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his Idyls of the King, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others.

Like her, he often glorifies unnatural passion in a way which, as in the twelfth and twenty-third Idyls, for example, tempts every normal person who can read the original to throw the whole book away in disgust.

Some of his verses are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and fields bewailed the absence of their forester, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another,responsive like idyls.

It does not lie primarily, or chiefly, in the fact that it is associated with names of the first rank in literature, with Theocritus and Vergil, with Petrarch, Politian, and Tasso, with Cervantes and Lope de Vega, with Ronsard and Marot, with Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Milton; nor yet that works such as the Idyls, the Aminta, the Faithful Shepherdess, and Lycidas contain some of the most graceful and perfect verse to be found in any language.

It was for his own solace, forgetful for a moment of the intrigues of court life and the uncertain sunshine of princes, that he wrote his Sicilian idyls.

To writers of the stamp of Ovid, Lucretius, and Vergil the Idyls of the Syracusan poet can have possessed but little meaning, and in his own Bucolics the last named seems never to have regarded the pastoral form as anything but a cloak for matters of more pith and moment.

In the Greek Idyls we find the simple faith or superstition as it lived among the shepherd-folk; no Pan appears to sow dismay in the breasts of the maidens, nor do we find aught of the mystical worship that later gathered round him in the imaginary Arcadia.

Work of the nature of the Idyls has to depend for its value and interest upon the artistic qualities of the poetry alone.

They have perished all but two lines which are found prefixed by way of motto to the Idyls: [Greek: de/xai ta\n a)gatha\n ty/chan, de/xai ta\n

Theocritus certainly modified the literary dialect in his pastoral idyls, and we may recall that when Vergil began his third eclogue with the line Die mihi, Damoeta, cuium pecus?

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.

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.

and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishers and gave them a place in the country of his idyls?

But now I let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds of Herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves.

In his longer narrative pieces, 'Judith' and 'Wyndham Towers,' cast in the mold of blank-verse idyls, Mr. Aldrich does not seem so much himself as in many of his briefer flights.

Let its work lie on our tables and dwell in our hearts with the "Idyls of the King,"the Aeolian memories of a chivalry departed blending with the voices of the nobler knighthood of our time.

They have been repeated in poetry and prose with endless variations, and some of our greatest modern writers have deemed them worthy of a new dress, as is seen in Tennyson's "Idyls of the King," Goethe's "Reineke Fuchs," Tegnér's "Frithiof Saga," Wieland's "Oberon," Morris's "Story of Sigurd," and many shorter works by these and less noted writers.