Her life as teacher and æsthetic guide in Lesbos evidently did not pass without a cloud. Her talent, like talent everywhere, found jealous rivals and detractors. A certain Andromeda seems to have caused her special vexation by luring away her favourite pupil Atthis. There were also, then as now, rich but uncultured women who had little love for art and its votaries, particularly if these latter were all too charming. To one such woman Sappho, who, like a true Æolian, looked with horror on a life without poetry and a death unhonoured by song, writes-- “When thou art dead, thou shalt lie, with none to remember or mourn, For ever and aye; for thy head no Pierian roses adorn; But e’en in the nether abodes thou shalt herd thee, unnoted, forlorn, With the dead whom the great dead scorn.” Her work as poetess, though of everlasting value for what it touches in universal humanity, naturally bears many marks of her country and her time. Besides her songs of personal emotion, she wrote in several of the various forms of occasional verse which we found reason to mention as existing in Lesbos. Of her wedding songs and epithalamia we possess a number of short fragments. Among them is one in the accepted amœbæan or antiphonic style, in which a band of girls mock the men with failure to win some dainty maiden, and the men reply with a taunt at the neglected bloom of the unprofitable virgin. Say the maids-- “On the top of the topmost spray The pippin blushes red, Forgot by the gatherers--nay! Was it “forgot” we said? ’Twas too far overhead!” Reply the men-- “The hyacinth so sweet On the hills where the herdsmen go Is trampled ’neath their feet, And its purple bloom laid low--” and there unhappily the record deserts us. The writing of Sappho was thus in no way dissociated from the surrounding life of Lesbos. Similarly the Lesbian love of bright and beautiful things--of gold, of roses, of sweet odours and sweet sounds--pervades all that is left of her. The Queen of Love sits on a richly-coloured throne; she dispenses the “nectar” of love in “beakers of gold”; she wears a “golden coronal”; the Graces have “rosy arms”; verses are the “rose-wreath of the Muses”; the blessed goddesses shower grace upon those who approach them with garlands on their heads. If maidens dance around the altar, they may dance most pleasantly on the tender grass flecked with flowers. It is sweet to lie in the garden of the Nymphs, where-- “Through apple-boughs, with purling sound, Cool waters creep; From quivering leaves descends around The dew of sleep.” Sweet among sounds is that of the “harbinger of spring, the nightingale, whose voice is all desire.” Sappho does in very truth, as she declares, love daintiness. Above all, she loves love. Love is the “nectar” in the lines-- “Come, Cyprian Queen, and, debonair, In golden cups the nectar bear, Wherein all festal joy must share Or be no joy.”