May I not here express the hope that some young Japanese poet, some graduate of this very university, will eventually attempt to do in Japan what Theocritus and Bion did in ancient Sicily?
A great deal of the very same kind of poetry exists in our own rural districts, and parallels can be found in the daily life of the Japanese peasants for everything beautifully described in Theocritus.

At all events I am quite sure of one thing, that no great new literature can possibly arise in this country until some scholarly minds discover that the real force and truth and beauty and poetry of life is to be found only in studies of the common people--not in the life of the rich and the noble, not in the shadowy life of books.
Well, our English poet felt with the Greek idylists, and in the poem called "An Invocation" he beautifully expresses this sympathy.

All of us, he says, should like to see and hear something of the ancient past if it were possible.

We should like, some of us, to call back the vanished gods and goddesses of the beautiful Greek world, or to talk to the great souls of that world who had the experience of life as men--to Socrates, for example, to Plato, to Phidias the sculptor, to Pericles the statesman.
But, as a poet, my wish would not be for the return of the old gods nor of the old heroes so much as for the return to us of some common men who lived in the Greek world.

It is Comatas, he says, that he would most like to see, and to see in some English park--in the neighbourhood of Cambridge University, or of Eton College.