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

Two of the pieces in this 1833 volume, the May Queen and the Miller's Daughter, were Tennyson's first poems of the affections, and as ballads of simple rustic life they anticipated his more perfect idyls in blank verse, such as Dora, the Brook, Edwin Morris, and the Gardener's Daughter.