Page:The Greek bucolic poets (1912).djvu/437

 III.—[FROM A SHEPHERD-MIME]

will you have is sweetest, Myrson, spring, winter, autumn, or summer? which are you fainest should come? Summer, when all our labours are fulfilled, or sweet autumn when our hunger is least and lightest, or the winter when no man can work—for winter also hath delights for many with her warm firesides and leisure hours—or doth the pretty springtime please you best? Say, where is the choice of your heart? To be sure, we have time and to spare for talking.

’Tis unseemly for mortal men to judge of the works of Heaven, and all these four are sacred, and every one of them sweet. But since you ask me, Cleodamus, I will tell you which I hold to be sweeter than the rest. I will not have your summer, for then the sun burns me; I will not have your autumn, neither, for that time o’ year breeds disease; and as for your winter, he is intolerable; I cannot away with frost and snow. For my part, give me all the year round the dear delightful spring, when cold doth not chill nor sun burn. In the spring the world’s abreeding, in the spring the world’s all sweet buds, and our days are as long as our nights and our nights as our days. . . . Rh