, the commonizing touch of the school and the
market-place. And under this test its glory grew ever more and more
conspicuous. Through those thousand years poets and critics vied with one
another in proclaiming her verse the one unmatched exemplar of lyric art.
Such testimony, even though not a single fragment remained to us from which
to judge her poetry for ourselves, might well convince us that the
supremacy acknowledged by those who knew all the triumphs of the genius of
old Greece was beyond the assault of any modern rival. We might safely
accept the sustained judgment of a thousand years of Greece.

Fortunately for us, however, two small but incomparable odes and a few
scintillating fragments have survived, quoted and handed down in the
eulogies of critics and expositors. In these the wisest minds, the greatest
poets, and the most inspired teachers of modern days have found
justification for the unanimous verdict of antiquity. The tributes of
Addison, Tennyson, and others, the throbbing paraphrases and ecstatic
interpretations of Swinburne, are too well known to call for special
comment in this brief note; but the concise summing up of her genius by Mr.
Watts-Dunton in his remarkable essay on poetry is so convincing and
illuminating that it seems to demand quotation here: "Never before these
songs were sung, and never since did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery
passion, utter a cry like hers; and, from the executive point of view, in
directness, in lucidity, in that high, imperious verbal economy which only
nature can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the
place of second."

The poems of Sappho so mysteriously lost to us seem to have consisted of at
least nine books of odes, together with _epithalamia_, epigrams,
elegies, and monodies. Of the several theories which have been advanced to
account for their disappearance, the most plausible seems to be that which
represents them as having been burned at Byzantium in the year 380 Anno
Domini, by command of Gregory Nazianzen, in order that his own poems might
be studied in their stead and the morals of the people thereby improved. Of
the efficacy of this act no means of judging has come down to us.

In recent years there has arisen a great body of literature upon the
subject of Sappho, most of it the abstruse work of scholars writing for
scholars. But the gist of it all, together with the minutest surviving
fragment of her verse, has been