shed;
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,
Hymenaeus!
Like Ares comes the bridegroom,
Hymenaeus!
Taller far than a tall man,
Hymenaeus!"

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 poss