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Other measures, used with more or less success, are the iambic scazon, the chorianibic, the glyconic, and the sapphic, all probably introduced from the Greek by Catullus. Of these the sapphic is the least perfected. If the eleventh and fifty-first odes be compared with the sapphic odes of Horace, the great metrical superiority of the latter will at once appear.
Every other political opportunity was seized with the same eagerness, and according to the reputation of the speaker, the concourse of the lovers of culture was great or small. At the yearly change of public officers, and even at the consecration of new bishops, a humanist was sure to come forward, and sometimes addressed his audience in hexameters or Sapphic verses.
With these we have no Sapphic associations; they make us think rather of Kant who could hit on nothing else to compare with his categorical imperative, perhaps because he found in both the same baffling incomprehensibility and the same fierce actuality. Such ultimate feelings are sensations of physical tension. Defects of pure multiplicity.
Or perhaps he was, like Blomfield and Monk, a "Greek Play Bishop," who had annotated Aeschylus or composed a Sapphic Ode on a Royal marriage.
I was a miserable failure as Peter the Hermit and Urban II.; my Godefroy de Bouillon was pronounced to be utterly devoid of military ardour. A warlike song in Sapphic and Adonic stanzas created a more favourable impression. My refrain Sternite Turcas, a short and sharp solution of the Eastern Question, was selected for recital in public. I was too staid for these childish proceedings.
Occasionally the services began with a Sapphic ode by Gregory the Great, whose opening line, Ecce iam noctis tenuatur umbra, set to music from the Salisbury Hymnal, resounded through the arches of the chapel like a call to the duties of the day.
One year the stylish craze was sesthetics, and I fought my way to the front of the bedlamites raving about Sapphic types, 'Sibylla Palmifera' and 'Astarte Syriaca'; and I wore miraculously limp, draggled skirts, that tangled about my feet tight as the robes of Burne Jones' 'Vivien. Next season the star of ceramics and bric-a-brac was in the ascendant, and I ran the gamut of Satsuma, Kyoto, de la Robbia, Limoge and Gubbio; of niello, and millchori glass, of Queen Anne brass and Japanese bronze; while my snuff boxes and my 'symphony in fans' graced all the loan exhibitions.
Of all the varied lyric rhythms none, at least to our ears, lends itself so readily to a musical setting as the Sapphic; and the many melodies attached to odes in this metre by the monks of the Middle Ages attest its special adaptability to choir-singing.
Crowned poet of the Emperor Frederick the Third, he had the right to speak on that subject; for while he vindicated as best he might old German literature against the charge of barbarism, he did also a man's part towards reviving in the Fatherland the knowledge of the poetry of Greece and Rome; and for Carl, the pearl, the golden nugget, of the volume was the Sapphic ode with which it closed To Apollo, praying that he would come to us from Italy, bringing his lyre with him: Ad Apollinem, ut ab Italis cum lyra ad Germanos veniat.
One day when Sossius entertained us, upon singing some Sapphic verses, this question was started, how it could be true That love in all doth vigorous thoughts inspire, And teaches ignorants to tune the lyre? Since Philoxenus, on the contrary, asserts, that the Cyclops With sweet-tongued Muses cured his love.
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