§ 66. Yet the name of Theocritus reminds us that in the midst of this decay a new kind of genuine poetry blossomed forth. The ephemeral life of individual men, contrasted with the apparent eternity of Nature, had profoundly affected Menander; and the contrast was now to be expressed in those "little pictures" of Theocritus, in which the shepherds in the front stand out against beautiful backgrounds of Nature's own creation. It was not, indeed, the first time that the sentiment of Nature had found a Greek voice. In the great epics, dating from a time when city life had not yet absorbed all the social interests of Hellas, we may readily cull out evidences of this sentiment. Thus in the Iliad[1] we have the simile—
"As when at night shine out in the sky by the moon in her glory
Bright stars, when not a breeze is stirring the calm of the heavens;
Watch-posts stand out clear, high headlands, and in the distance
Open glades, and the open of sky looks a break in the heavens;
And as he watches the host of the stars the shepherd rejoices;"
or, in the Odyssey,[2] the famous description of the great boar's lair—
"Here was the lair of the great boar deep in the heart of the thicket,
Here where the raging rains of the storm-clouds never had entered,
Here where the blaze of the noonday sun shot never a sunbeam,
Here where the piled-up leaves lay dark in the heart of the thicket."
Every reader of the Greek epics can recall similar passages the—description of Calypso's cave or that of the garden of Alkinous; and the Works and Days of Hesiod contain a picture of winter truly ancient and graphic. Moreover, in certain lyrics of early Greece a deep feeling for Nature had not been wanting. Thus Aleman's description of night, it has been said, is "more like the picture we should expect from Apollonius Rhodius or Vergil than from an early Greek poet"—
"Now sleep the mountain-peaks and vales,
