its collection, several hitherto unknown poems of Sappho.

"Few, indeed, but those roses," as says Meleager, in the Anthology, are
the precious verses spared to us in spite of the unholy zeal of
antipaganism. And, strange to relate, we are indebted for what we have
to the quotations of grammarians and lexicographers, who preserved the
verses, not usually for their poetic beauty, but to illustrate a point
in syntax or metre. But, though so few and fragmentary, they are, as
Professor Palgrave says, "grains of golden sand which the torrent of
Time has carried down to us."

Sappho wrote in the Жolic dialect, noted for the soft quality of its
vowel sounds; and her poems were undoubtedly written for recitation to
the accompaniment of the lyre, being the earliest specimens of the song
or ballad so popular in modern times.

Predecessors of the melic poetry of Sappho are to be found in the chants
and hymns in honor of Apollo prevalent throughout Greece, in the popular
songs of Hellas, and in the songs sung in the home and at religious
festivals by Lesbian men and women,--children's rhymes, songs at vintage
festivals, plaints of shepherds expressive of rustic love, epithalamia
or bridal songs, dirges, threnodies and laments for Adonis, typifying
the passing of spring and summer.

The form and melody of Sappho's poems are due to the fact that they were
to accompany vocal and instrumental music, which, thanks to the
innovations of Terpander of Lesbos, was at that time exquisitely adapted
to the purposes of the lyric. Terpander introduced the seven-stringed
lyre, or cithara, with its compass of a diapason, or Greek octave, and
this became the peculiar instrument of Sappho and her school. The choice
of the musical measure determined the tone of the poem. Terpander united
the music of Asia Minor with that of Greece proper, and the resulting
product of Жolian poetry was the union of Oriental voluptuousness with
Greek self-restraint and art. Of Sappho's numerous songs, two odes alone
are presented to us in anything like their entirety, one dedicated to
the service of Aphrodite, and the other composed in honor of a girl
friend, Anactoria. Dionysius of Halicarnassus embodies the first in one
of his rhetorical works, as a perfect illustration of the elaborately
finished style of poetry, and comments on the fact that its grace and
beauty lie in the subtle harmony between the words and the ideas. Edwin
Arnold renders it as follows:

      "Splendor-throned Queen, immortal Aphrodite,
       Daughter of Jove, Enchantress, I implore thee
       Vex not my soul with agonies and anguish;
                 Slay me not, Goddess!
       Come in thy pity--come, if I have prayed thee;
       Come at the cry of my sorrow; in the old times
       Oft thou hast heard, and left thy father's heaven,
                 Left the gold houses,
       Yoking thy chariot. Swiftly did the doves fly,
       Swiftly they brought thee, waving plumes of wonder--
       Waving their dark plumes all across the жther,
                 All down the azure.
       Very soon they lighted. Then didst thou, Divine one,
       Laugh a bright laugh from lips and eyes immortal,
       Ask me 'What ailed me--wherefore out of heaven,
                 Thus I had called thee?
       What was it made me madden in my heart so?'
       Question me smiling--say to me, 'My Sappho,
       Who is it wrongs thee? Tell me who refuses
                Thee, vainly sighing.
       Be it who it may be, he that flies shall follow;
       He that rejects gifts, he shall bring thee many;
       He that hates now shall love thee dearly, madly--
                Aye, though thou wouldst not'
       So once again come, Mistress; and, releasing
       Me from my sadness, give me what I sue for,
       Grant me my prayer, and be as heretofore now
                Friend and protectress."

The ode to Anactoria is quoted by the author of the treatise on _The
Sublime_ as an illustration of the perfection of the sublime in poetry.
John Addington Symonds thus renders it in English:

      "Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
       Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
       Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
                  Silverly speaking,
       Laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only
       Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble I
       For should I but see thee a little moment,
                  Straight is my voice hushed;
       Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
       'Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling;
       Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring
                  Waves in my ear sounds;
       Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
       All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
       Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
                  Lost in the love-trance."

Epithalamia, or wedding songs, were the most numerous of all Sappho's
works, and in them she attained an excellence unequalled by any other
poet. Catullus, in despair, seems to have been content with adapting in
his marriage odes well-known songs of Sappho. The poet seems to have
described all the stages in the ceremony--the Greek maidens leading the
pale bride to the expectant bridegroom, chanting their simple chorus to
Hymen, the god of marriage. At one time, they sing the approach of the
bridegroom:

      "Raise high the roof-beam, carpenters,
                                   Hymenжus!
       Like Ares comes the bridegroom,
                                   Hymenжus!
       Taller far than a tall man,
                                   Hymenжus!"

But their thoughts are all for the rejoicing bride, who blushes "as
sweet as the apple on the end of the bough."

            "O fair--O sweet!
      As the sweet apple blooms high on the bough,
      High as the highest, forgot of the gatherers:
            So thou:--
      Yet not so: nor forgot of the gatherers;
      High o'er their reach in the golden air,
            O sweet--O fair!"

We shall arrange the briefer fragments according to subject, not
according to metre, in order that through them we may gain a clear
conception of Sappho's attitude toward life and nature, that we may know
the poetess in her love and friendship, her longings and her sorrows,
her sensibility to the influences of nature and art.

Her conception of love has been already noticed in the longer poems just
quoted. A number of the fragments indicate a similar intensity of
emotion. Thus she says:

      "Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving king,
       The bitter-sweet, impracticable thing,
       Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering."

In another:

      "Lo, Love once more my soul within me rends
       Like wind that on the mountain oak descends."

A being so intense as Sappho, with sensibilities so refined and
intuitions so keen, naturally possessed an ardent love of nature. Her
power of expressing its charm is shown in a number of fragments. Every
aspect of nature seems to have appealed to her.

Of the morning she says:

      "Early uprose the golden-sandalled Dawn."

And of the evening:

      "Evening, all things thou bringest
       Which Dawn spreads apart from each other;
       The lamb and the kid thou bringest,
       Thou bringest the boy to his mother."

And of the night:

      "And dark-eyed Sleep, child of Night"

She sings to us also of the

      "Rainbow, shot with a thousand hues."

And of the stars:

      "Stars that shine around the refulgent full moon
       Pale, and hide their glory of lesser lustre
       When she pours her silvery plenilunar
       Light on the orbed earth."

And again of the moon and the Pleiades:

      "The moon has left the sky;
       Lost is the Pleiads' light;
           It is midnight
           And time slips by;
       But on my couch alone I lie."

Trees and flowers and plants appeal to her as if they were endowed with
life, and by her mention of them she calls up to the imagination a
tropical summer with its attendant recreations. Thus she sings of the
breeze murmuring cool through the apple boughs:

      "From the sound of cool waters heard through the green boughs
       Of the fruit-bearing trees,
       And the rustling breeze,
       Deep sleep, as a trance, down over me flows."

Sappho loves flowers with a personal sympathy. She feels for the
hyacinth:

      "As when the shepherds on the hills
       Tread under foot the hyacinth,
       And on the ground the purple flower lies crushed."

She sings also of the golden pulse that grows on the shores, and of the
pure, soft bloom of the grass trampled under foot by the Cretan women as
they dance round the fair altar of Aphrodite. The rose seems to have
been her favorite flower, for, says Philostratus, "Sappho loves the
rose, and always crowns it with some praise, likening beautiful maidens
to it."

The birds, too, found in her a most sympathetic friend. Her ear is open
to:

      "Spring's messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale,"

and she pities the wood-doves as "their heart turns cold and their wings
fall," under the stroke from the arrow of the archer.

Sappho's love for nature is only surpassed by her love for art, for
splendor and festivity, as they appeal to the жsthetic nature. She loves
her lyre, the song and the dance, garlands, purple robes, and all that
attended the worship of Aphrodite and the Muses. Her lyre she thus
addresses:

      "Come, then, my lyre divine!
       Let speech be thine."

And to Aphrodite she utters this appeal:

      "Come, Queen of Cyprus, pour the stream
       Of nectar, mingled lusciously
       With merriment, in cups of gold."

She also calls about her the Muses and the Graces:

      "Hither come, ye dainty Graces
       And ye fair-haired Muses now!"

And again:

      "Come, rosy-armed, chaste Graces! come,
             Daughter of Jove."

And yet again:

      "Hither, hither come, ye Muses!
       Leave the golden sky."

In the worship of Aphrodite and the Graces, garlands are appropriate for
the devotees:

      "Of foliage and flowers love-laden
       Twine wreaths for thy flowing hair
       With thine own soft fingers, maiden,
       Weave garlands of parsley fair;

      "For flowers are sweet, and the Graces
       On suppliants wreathed with may
       Look down from their heavenly places,
       But turn from the crownless away."

Such was the joy of the devotees of the Muses. Sappho believed in the
adornment of the soul as well as of the body, and she thus addresses one
who neglected the services of the Muses:

      "Yea, thou shalt die,
       And lie
       Dumb in the silent tomb;
       Nor of thy name
       Shall there be any fame
       In ages yet to be or years to come;
       For of the flowering Rose,
       Which on Pieria blows,
       Thou hast no share:
       But in sad Hades' house
       Unknown, inglorious
       'Mid the dark shades that wander there
       Shalt thou flit forth and haunt the filmy air."

"I think there will be memory of us yet in after days," said Sappho, and
the sentiment is one which later poets have often imitated. Thus the
poetess had intimations of the immortality that is justly hers, and the
reader will heartily enter into the spirit of Swinburne's paraphrase:

      "I, Sappho, shall be one with all these things,
       With all things high forever; and my face
       Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place,
       Cleave to men's lives, and waste the days thereof
       In gladness, and much sadness and long love."

Sappho sings of love and its manifestations, of longing and passion, of
grief and regret, of natural beauty in sea and sky, by day and by night,
of the birds and trees and flowers, and "all this is told us in language
at once overpowering and delicate, in verse as symmetrical as it is
exquisite, free, and fervid, through metaphor simple or sublime; each
word, each line, expressive of the writer's inmost sense;