Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/131

Rh golden age. More than the epic or the novel, the idyl influenced the future. Arcadia is a well-known region in every great literature of Europe, and its atmosphere still hangs over the opera. The creator of this pastoral myth was the father of much beauty. Something was borrowed from the Garden of Eden, from the Virgilian fields, and from the Earthly Paradise; the religious, classical, and mediæval moods united in it; but essentially it was pure Italian,—Arcadia was an idealized Italy. The scene presented was the same country life that forms the background of all contemporary literature, but charmed, ennobled, and bathed in a softer than Italian air. There was little left in that age of ruin but delight in the natural beauty that was darkened by no shadow of humanity. The villa, the cultivated fields, the still, calm morning sky, were probably never more dear to the Italian heart than then, and it was this unsophisticated and keenly felt delight in nature that flowered in the idyl. To Northern nations Arcadia must always be a dream; to the Italians, then, at least, it was only the refinement of what was most real to them. It was because the idyl was so deeply rooted