essed an ardent love of nature. Her
power of expressing its charm is shown in a number of fragments. Every
aspect of nature seems to have appealed to her.

Of the morning she says:

"Early uprose the golden-sandalled Dawn."

And of the evening:

"Evening, all things thou bringest
Which Dawn spreads apart from each other;
The lamb and the kid thou bringest,
Thou bringest the boy to his mother."

And of the night:

"And dark-eyed Sleep, child of Night"

She sings to us also of the

"Rainbow, shot with a thousand hues."

And of the stars:

"Stars that shine around the refulgent full moon
Pale, and hide their glory of lesser lustre
When she pours her silvery plenilunar
Light on the orbed earth."

And again of the moon and the Pleiades:

"The moon has left the sky;
Lost is the Pleiads' light;
It is midnight
And time slips by;
But on my couch alone I lie."

Trees and flowers and plants appeal to her as if they were endowed with
life, and by her mention of them she calls up to the imagination a
tropical summer with its attendant recreations. Thus she sings of the
breeze murmuring cool through the apple boughs:

"From the sound of cool waters heard through the green boughs
Of the fruit-bearing trees,
And the rustling breeze,
Deep sleep, as a trance, down over me flows."

Sappho loves flowers with a personal sympathy. She feels for the
hyacinth:

"As when the shepherds on the hills
Tread under foot the hyacinth,
And on the ground the purple flower lies crushed."

She sings also of the golden pulse that grows on the shores, and of the
pure, soft bloom of the grass trampled under foot by the Cretan women as
they dance round the fair altar of Aphrodite. The rose seems to have
been her favorite flower, for, says Philostratus, "Sappho loves the
rose, and always crowns it with some praise, likening beautiful maidens
to it."

The birds, too, found in her a most sympathetic friend. Her ear is open
to:

"Spring's messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale,"

and she pities the wood-doves as "their heart turns cold and their wings
fall," under the stroke from the arrow of the archer.

Sappho's love for nature is only surpassed by her love for art, for
splendor and festivity, as they appeal to the aesthetic nature. She loves
her lyre, the song