The few fragments of Sappho which have been preserved are not those which have been spared by the saints or which have been culled for special innocence. They simply happen to be quoted here and there by ancient critics, grammarians, and even lexicographers, to illustrate some æsthetic doctrine, the use of some word, or even some peculiarity of grammar. And no understanding man or woman can read them without feeling that what we find is sheer poetry, sound and true, free from dross in either form or thought. Says Sappho herself, “I love daintiness, and for me love possesses the brightness and beauty of the sun.” To Alcæus, her fellow-countryman and acquaintance, she was the “violet-weaving, pure, sweetly-smiling Sappho.” To Plato, who judged even art by ethical standards, she is “beautiful and wise.” Her reply to her fellow-poet, when he was too bashful to say something which was in his mind, was this-- “Had your desire been right and good, Your tongue perplex’d with no bad thought, With frank eye unabashed you would Have spoken of the thing you ought.” To some lover she says--if she is speaking in her own person-- “As friends we’ll part: Win thee a younger bride; Too old, I lack the heart To keep thee at my side.” Nay, we may go further and say that, after reading and re-reading and translating and commenting on her poems, so far as we possess them, we find her verse full indeed of warmth and colour, full of poignant feeling, but never riotous, always sane, always controlled by the truest sense of art. Obedience to the central Greek motto μηδὲν ἄγαν--“nothing too much”--was never better exemplified. The Greeks would never have set her on such a pedestal if she had been the poetical mænad who seems to exist in the mind of Swinburne, when he writes of her, in that vicious exaggeration of phrase which he too often affects, as-- “Love’s priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, Song’s priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.” No writer so lacking in _sophrosyne_ could assert, as Swinburne elsewhere in his finer and truer style makes her assert-- “I Sappho shall be one ... ... with all high things for ever.” There is not a line of Sappho of which you do not feel that, glow as it may with feeling, it is constructed with such art as--unconscious though it may possibly be--can only be sustained in a mind of perfect sanity.