s appeals--the love for poetry
always more diffused throughout a people, in proportion as it is less
written than recited. How few, even at this day, will read a poem!--
what crowds will listen to a song! Recitation transfers the stage of
effect from the closet to the multitude--the public becomes an
audience, the poet an orator. And when we remember that the poetry,
thus created, imbodying the most vivid, popular, animated subjects of
interest, was united with all the pomp of festival and show--all the
grandest, the most elaborate, and artful effects of music--we may
understand why the true genius of lyrical composition has passed for
ever away from the modern world.

As early as between 708 and 665 B. C., Archilochus brought to
perfection a poetry worthy of loftier passions than those which mostly
animated his headstrong and angry genius. In 625 (thirty-one years
before the legislation of Solon) flourished Arion, the Lesbian, who,
at Corinth, carried, to extraordinary perfection the heroic adaptation
of song to choral music. In 611 flourished the Sicilian, Stersichorus
--no unworthy rival of Arion; while simultaneously, in strains less
national and Grecian, and more resembling the inspiration of modern
minstrels, Alcaeus vented his burning and bitter spirit;--and Sappho
(whose chaste and tender muse it was reserved for the chivalry of a
northern student, five-and-twenty centuries after the hand was cold
and the tongue was mute, to vindicate from the longest-continued
calumny that genius ever endured) [177] gave to the most ardent of
human passions the most delicate colouring of female sentiment.
Perhaps, of all that Greece has bequeathed to us, nothing is so
perfect in its concentration of real feeling as the fragments of
Sappho. In one poem of a few lines--nor that, alas! transmitted to us
complete--she has given a picture of the effect of love upon one who
loves, to which volumes of the most eloquent description could
scarcely add a single new touch of natural pathos--so subtle is it,
yet so simple. I cannot pass over in silence the fragments of
Mimnermus (fl. B. C. 630)--they seem of an order so little akin to the
usual character of Grecian poetry; there is in them a thoughtful
though gloomy sadness, that belongs rather to the deep northern
imagination than the brilliant fancies of the west; their melancholy
is mixed with something half intellectual--half voluptuous--indicative
of the mournful but interestin