The heat of the day is at its height, but for an hour the burden slips from the shoulders of care, and the rest comes in which the gains of work are garnered.
The whir of the locust high overhead, by some earlier association, always recalls that matchless singer, some of whose notes Nature has never regained in all these later years.

The whir of the cicada and the white light on the remote country road are real to us today, though one went silent and the other faded out of Sicilian skies two thousand years and more ago, because both are preserved in the verse of Theocritus.

The poet was something more than a mere observer of Nature, and the beautiful repose of his art more than the native grace and ease of one to whom life meant nothing more strenuous than a dream of a blue sea and fair sky.

He had known the din of the crowded street as well as the silence of the country road, the forms and shows of a royal court as well as the simplicity and sincerity of tangled vines and gnarled olives on the hillside.

He had seen, with those eyes which overlooked nothing, the pomps and vanities of power, the fret and fever of ambition, the impotence and barrenness of much of that activity in which multitudes of men spend their lives under the delusion that mere stir and bustle mean progress and achievement.