Judging from her fragments, we must admit that in her peculiar department Sappho stands without a peer. Indeed, her own graceful lines may well be applied to herself:— “The stars that round the beauteous moon Attendant wait, cast into shade Their ineffectual lustres, soon As she, in full-orbed majesty arrayed, Her silver radiance showers Upon this world of ours,”— for the lesser lights of lyric poesy pale in the lustre of her genius. Addison, in his Spectator, makes the following remarks on Sappho, which are fully justified by the praises of ancient critics:—“Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there are none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. One may see, by what is left, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit, with which many of our modern lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry. She felt the passion in all its warmth and described it in all its symptoms. I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading.” It is told that a physician, by studying the symptoms of love as described by Sappho, detected in the mysterious sickness of the young Anti’ochus, son of the king of Syria, a hidden passion for his step-mother. The treatment was in accordance with the diagnosis, the disease disappearing when the anxious father relinquished to the youth the beautiful object of his affections. Sappho’s description of the raptures of love, commended by all critics from Longinus down, is certainly a nonpareil. It has been thus translated by Ambrose Philips, a friend of Addison’s:— A LOVE SONG. “Blest as th’ immortal gods is he, The youth who fondly sits by thee, And hears, and sees thee all the while Softly speak and sweetly smile. ’Twas this deprived my soul of rest, And raised such tumults in my breast; For while I gazed in transport tost, My breath was gone, my voice was lost. My bosom glowed: the subtle flame Ran quick through all my vital frame; O’er my dim eyes a darkness hung; My ears with hollow murmurs rung. In dewy damps my limbs were chill’d; My blood with gentle horrors thrill’d; My feeble pulse forgot to play; I fainted, sunk, and died away.” The grave Solon paid our authoress a delicate compliment. Having heard his nephew recite one of her poems, he is said to have exclaimed that he would not willingly die till he had learned it by heart.