PHO.

When the Akropolis at Athens bore its beautiful burden entire and
perfect, one miniature temple stood dedicated to wingless Victory, in
token that the city which had defied and driven back the barbarian
should never know defeat.

But only a few decades had passed away when that temple stood as a mute
and piteous witness that Athens had been laid low in the dust, and that
Victory, though she could never weave a garland for Hellenes who had
conquered Hellenes, was no longer a living power upon her chosen
citadel. By the eighteenth century the shrine had altogether
disappeared: the site only could be traced, and four slabs from its
frieze were discovered close at hand, built into the walls of a Turkish
powder magazine; but not another fragment could be found.

The descriptions of Pausanias and of one or two later travellers were
all that remained to tell us of the whole; of its details we might form
some faint conception from those frieze marbles, rescued by Lord Elgin
and now in the British museum.

But we are not left to restore the temple of wingless Victory in our
imagination merely, aided by description and by fragment. It stands
to-day almost complete except for its shattered sculptures, placed upon
its original site, and looking, among the ruins of the grander buildings
around it, like a beautiful child who gazes for the first time on sorrow
which it feels but cannot share. The blocks of marble taken from its
walls and columns had been embedded in a mass of masonry, and when
Greece was once more free, and all traces of Turkish occupation were
being cleared from the Akropolis, these were carefully put together with
the result that we have described.

Like this in part, but unhappily only in part, is the story of the poems
of Sappho. She wrote, as the architect planned, for all time. We have
one brief fragment, proud, but pathetic in its pride, that tells us she
knew she was meant not altogether to die:

"I say that there will be remembrance of us hereafter,"

and again with lofty scorn she addresses some other woman:

"But thou shalt lie dead, nor shall there ever be remembrance of
thee then or in the time to come, for thou hast no share in the
roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander unseen even in the halls of
Hades, flitting forth amid the shades of the dead."

The words sound in our ears with a melancholy close as we remember how
hopelessly lost is almost every one of thos