made available to the general reader in
English by Mr. Henry T. Wharton, in whose altogether admirable little
volume we find all that is known and the most apposite of all that has been
said up to the present day about

"Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song's priestess, mad with joy and pain of love."

Perhaps the most perilous and the most alluring venture in the whole field
of poetry is that which Mr. Carman has undertaken in attempting to give us
in English verse those lost poems of Sappho of which fragments have
survived. The task is obviously not one of translation or of paraphrasing,
but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction. It is
as if a sculptor of to-day were to set himself, with reverence, and trained
craftsmanship, and studious familiarity with the spirit, technique, and
atmosphere of his subject, to restore some statues of Polyclitus or
Praxiteles of which he had but a broken arm, a foot, a knee, a finger upon
which to build. Mr. Carman's method, apparently, has been to imagine each
lost lyric as discovered, and then to translate it; for the indefinable
flavour of the translation is maintained throughout, though accompanied by
the fluidity and freedom of purely original work.

C.G.D. ROBERTS.

Now to please my little friend
I must make these notes of spring,
With the soft south-west wind in them
And the marsh notes of the frogs.

I must take a gold-bound pipe,
And outmatch the bubbling call
From the beechwoods in the sunlight,
From the meadows in the rain.

CONTENTS

Now to please my little friend

I Cyprus, Paphos, or Panormus

II What shall we do, Cytherea?

III Power and beauty and knowledge

IV O Pan of the evergreen forest

V O Aphrodite

VI Peer of the gods he seems

VII The Cyprian came to thy cradle

VIII Aphrodite of the foam

IX Nay, but always and forever

X Let there be garlands, Dica

XI When the Cretan maidens

XII In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born

XIII Sleep thou in the bosom

XIV Hesperus, bringing together

XV In the grey olive-grove a small brown bird

XVI In the apple-boughs the coolness

XVII Pale rose-leaves have fallen

XVIII The courtyard of her house is wide

XIX There is a medlar-tree

XX I behold Arcturus going westward

XXI Softly the first step of twilig