There is something else which is too often strangely overlooked in judging a poet from his writings alone. It is particularly liable to be forgotten when the writings which have been preserved are but fragments severed from their context. The poet is not always writing in his own person; he is not always revealing his own feelings. He is often dramatising; and his verses then utter the sentiments and passions suited to the character concerned. No one will accept a passage culled from Shakespeare as proof of the ethical views of Shakespeare himself. It may express only the whim of Falstaff, or the snarl of Shylock, or the banter of Benedick, or the melancholy humour of Hamlet. Allowing for all the difference between lyric poetry and dramatic, the lyrist also has his passages in which he is speaking for another. He may be actually writing _for_ another. _In Memoriam_ doubtless represents the heart of Tennyson himself. But suppose posterity to retain but a few fragments of his other works. What shall we say of those who might take the isolated words “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead” as a proof of the settled pessimism of our poet? We know that the speaker was Mariana. We do not always know who is the speaker in the fragments of Sappho. But, even if we did know, there still remains not a verse which betrays the too much, or which passes beyond the pathetic into the reckless, the hysterical, still less the dissolute. Behind Sappho, as behind Burns before he wrote “Green grow the rushes O” or “Auld Lang Syne,” lay a mass of popular ballads and a wealth of lyrical ideas to be seized upon and shaped when the perfect mood arrived. When she sings-- “Sunk is the moon; The Pleiades are set; ’Tis midnight; soon The hour is past; and yet I lie alone”-- it is probable that she is setting one such prehistoric lyrical idea to new words or recasting one such vagrom ditty. It is practically certain that she is doing so in that quatrain which begins “Sweet mother mine, I cannot ply my loom.” That thought is embodied in English folksong also--“O mother, put my wheel away; I cannot spin to-night”--as well as in German and other tongues. Let us then sweep aside from the memory of Sappho the myths of Phaon and the Leucadian leap, and the calumnies of Athenian worldlings in the comic theatre; let us reject all that Swinburnian hyperbole which makes her “mad” in any sense whatever; and let us simply take her upon the strength of the “few passages, but roses” which are left to us, and upon the word of Alcæus that she was the “violet-weaving, pure, sweetly-smiling Sappho.”