A being so intense as Sappho, with sensibilities so refined and intuitions so keen, naturally possessed 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 and the dance, garlands, purple robes, and all that attended the worship of Aphrodite and the Muses. Her lyre she thus addresses: "Come, then, my lyre divine! Let speech be thine." And to Aphrodite she utters this appeal: "Come, Queen of Cyprus, pour the stream Of nectar, mingled lusciously With merriment, in cups of gold." She also calls about her the Muses and the Graces: