Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/118

88 Love's priestess of Mitylene, the "violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho." The pity of it is Sappho. that we have only the glory of her name, celebrated by her contemporaries and successors, and justified to us by two lyrics in the stanzaic measure of her invention, and by a few fragments of verse more lasting than the tablets of the Parthenon. But the "Hymn to Aphrodite" and the are enough to assure us that no other singer has so united the intensity of passion with charm of melody and form. A panting, living woman, a radiant artist, are immanent in every verse. After twenty-five centuries, Sappho leads the choir of poets that have sung their love; and from her time to that of Elizabeth Browning no woman has so distinguished her sex. The Christian sibyl moved in a more ethereal zone of feeling, but could not equal her Ægean prototype in unerring art, although, by the law of true expression, most artistic where she is most intense.

The note which we call modern is frequent in the Classical expressions of feeling. dramas of Euripides, and in those of his satirist, Aristophanes; it drifts, in minor waves of feeling, with the lovely Grecian epitaphs and tributes to the dead,—that feeling, the breath of personal art, which Mahaffy illustrates from the bas-reliefs and mortuary emblems which beautify the tombs west of Athens. The Greek anthology is rich with sentiment of this cast, so pathetic—and so human. As an instance of what I mean, let me