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This is the sole theme of Sapphics, in which poem the goddess, displeased by Sappho's preferment of love poetry to the actual delights of love, yet tried to win Sappho back to her: Called to her, saying "Turn to me, O my Sappho," Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not Tears or laughter darken immortal eyelids.... Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers, Full of songs and kisses and little whispers, Full of music; only beheld among them Soar as a bird soars Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion, Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders, Clothed with the wind's wings.

The Virgilian movement differs not more from the Homeric, than does the Horatian sapphic or alcaic from the same metres as treated by their Greek inventors. The success of Horace may be judged by comparing his stanzas with the sapphics of Catullus on the one hand, and the alcaics of Statius on the other.

For instance, there is a school which has at this moment one of the first scholars in Europe for head-master, a school which has turned out some of the most remarkable men of the rising generation. The master sees at a glance if a boy be clever, and takes pains with him accordingly. He is not a mere teacher of hexameters and sapphics. His learning embraces all literature, ancient and modern.

Its very familiarity makes it unnecessary to dwell much on it, but it is safe to say that nothing of the kind more brilliant has ever been written, or is very likely ever to be written, than the parodies of Southey's Sapphics and "Henry Martin" sonnet, the litany of the Jacobins, French and English, the "skits" on Payne Knight and Darwin, The Rovers, mocking the new German sentimentalism and mediævalism, and the stately satire of "The New Morality," where, almost alone, the writers become serious, and reach a height not attained since Dryden.

"Worse luck to her if she invented Sapphics," added Herbert. "One of womankind's torments for mankind, eh?" said his neighbour. "And there are plenty more such," asserted Mrs. "It is only that one can't recollect and the men have suppressed them." "I think men praised them," said Jenny, "and that we remember the praise, not the works. For instance, Roswitha, or Olympia Morata, or Vittoria Colonna.

There is a foreign grace and a little technical difficulty overcome in the English ballade and villanelle, as in the Horatian sapphics and alcaics. I would not say so much, on my own responsibility, nor trespass so far on the domain of scholarship, but this opinion was communicated to me by a learned professor of Latin.

I did not mind her being amused indeed, that was the object of my narrative but her contempt was just as much misplaced as if I had despised her for not being able to tell the difference between sapphics and alcaics, which it was my business to know. It is the complacency, the self-satisfaction, that results from the worship of games, which is one of its most serious features.

Blank odes have been known in this country about as long as English sapphics and dactylics; and both have been considered, we believe, as a species of monsters, or exotics, that were not very likely to propagate, or thrive, in so unpropitious a climate. Mr. Southey, however, has made a vigorous effort for their naturalisation, and generously endangered his own reputation in their behalf.

Let the candid reader own, if ever he had a literary turn, that his ambition was of the very highest, and that however, in his riper age, he might come down in his pretensions, and think that to translate an ode of Horace, or to turn a song of Waller or Prior into decent alcaics or sapphics, was about the utmost of his capability, tragedy and epic only did his green unknowing youth engage, and no prize but the highest was fit for him.

We may now reconstruct for ourselves the classic scene with Orpheus "singing on the hill to his lyre" the verses "O meos longum modulata lusus." The music was the half melancholy, half passionate melody of some wandering Italian frottola which readily fitted itself to the sonorous Sapphics.