particular form for the genitive case of the first
personal pronoun, has treasured up two sad and significant utterances,

"But thou forgettest me!"

and

"Or else thou lovest another than me,"

The AEolic genitive has saved for us another of these sorrow-laden
sentences which Mr. Swinburne has amplified in some beautiful but too
wordy lines. Sappho only says

"I am full weary of Gorgo."

--A few of these fragments tell us of the poet herself.

"I have a daughter like golden flowers, Kleis my beloved, for whom
(I would take) not all Sydia...."

and one beautiful line which we can recognise in the translation by
Catullus,

"Like a child after its mother, I--"

The touches by which she has painted nature are so fine and delicate
that the only poet of our time who has a right to attempt to translate
them has declared it to be "the one impossible task." Our English does,
indeed, sound harsh and unmusical as we try to represent her words; yet
what a picture is here--

"And round about the cold (stream) murmurs through the
apple-orchards, and slumber is shed down from trembling leaves."

She makes us hear the wind upon the mountains falling on the oaks; she
makes us feel the sun's radiance and beauty, as it glows through her
verses; she makes us love with her the birds and the flowers that she
loved. She has a womanly pity not only for the dying doves when--

"Their hearts grew cold and they dropped their wings,"

but for the hyacinth which the shepherds trample under foot upon the
hillside. The golden pulse growing on the shore, the roses, the garlands
of dill, are yet fragrant for us; we can even now catch the sweet tones
of the "Spring's angel," as she calls it, the nightingale that sang in
Lesbos ages and ages ago. One beautiful fragment has been woven with
another into a few perfect lines by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; but it shall
be given here as it stands. It describes a young, unwedded maiden:

"As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough, the very end
of the bough which the gatherers overlooked--nay, overlooked not,
but could not reach."

The Ode to Aphrodite and the fragment to Anaktoria are too often found
in translations to be quoted here. Indeed, it is of but little use to
quote; for Sappho can be known only in her own language and by those who
will devote time to these inestimable fragments. Their beauty grows upon
us as we read