Modernity has taught us, with some reason, to laugh at pastorals. Nevertheless there is deep humanity in those artificial songs of shepherds and shepherdesses. With the frigid pipings of Thyrsis and Corydon we are indeed out of tune. Since, however, the pastoral fascinated Theocritus, Virgil, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Spenser, who wrote for ail time, we ought to approach the outworn form in a spirit of serious sympathy. Even proud idealists sometimes waver. Poetry must furnish, at times, an escape from life—not always the clarion call to life's struggles. Men took the pastoral in order to flee for a moment into Arcadia, to clothe in pleasant vagueness confessions of the delightful miseries of calf-love, though strife stole too often even into Arcadia and goaded the shepherds into worldly bickerings. We have the same aspirations to-day as those poets when they wrote their pastorals,—moods that are not mere toys; but because hope is edged with doubt, we trifle with our dreams in ways no less artificial than the pleasant game of pastoral-making. We have not outgrown the pastoralist's moods.