gland has given to the world one great poetess, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. By her side Mr. Swinburne would place Miss Christina Rossetti,
whose New Year hymn he describes as so much the noblest of sacred poems
in our language, that there is none which comes near it enough to stand
second. 'It is a hymn,' he tells us, 'touched as with the fire, and
bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of
refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the
serene and sonorous tides of heaven.' Much as I admire Miss Rossetti's
work, her subtle choice of words, her rich imagery, her artistic naivete,
wherein curious notes of strangeness and simplicity are fantastically
blended together, I cannot but think that Mr. Swinburne has, with noble
and natural loyalty, placed her on too lofty a pedestal. To me, she is
simply a very delightful artist in poetry. This is indeed something so
rare that when we meet it we cannot fail to love it, but it is not
everything. Beyond it and above it are higher and more sunlit heights of
song, a larger vision, and an ampler air, a music at once more passionate
and more profound, a creative energy that is born of the spirit, a winged
rapture that is born of the soul, a force and fervour of mere utterance
that has all the wonder of the prophet, and not a little of the
consecration of the priest.

Mrs. Browning is unapproachable by any woman who has ever touched lyre or
blown through reed since the days of the great AEolian poetess. But
Sappho, who to the antique world was a pillar of flame, is to us but a
pillar of shadow. Of her poems, burnt with other most precious work by
Byzantine Emperor and by Roman Pope, only a few fragments remain.
Possibly they lie mouldering in the scented darkness of an Egyptian tomb,
clasped in the withered hand of some long-dead lover. Some Greek monk at
Athos may even now be poring over an ancient manuscript, whose crabbed
characters conceal lyric or ode by her whom the Greeks spoke of as 'the
Poetess' just as they termed Homer 'the Poet,' who was to them the tenth
Muse, the flower of the Graces, the child of Eros, and the pride of
Hellas--Sappho, with the sweet voice, the bright, beautiful eyes, the
dark hyacinth coloured hair. But, practically, the work of the
marvellous singer of Lesbos is entirely lost to us.

We have a few rose-leaves out of her garden, that is all. Literature
nowadays survives marble and bronze, but