But whatever the fate it failed in its evil intention. Sappho remains, eternal as Sirius, and it is doubtful if her charm and her hold upon the world would have been strengthened by the full preservation of her work. As it is, added to the longing which all great art inspires, we have the longing inspired by suggestion. That lovely figure belonging to the feet she shows us "crossed by a broidered strap of Lydian work," would it have been as beautiful unveiled as imagined? Did she long for maidenhood? Why did the swallow trouble her, and what did the daughter of Cyprus say to her in a dream? There is not a fragment of Sappho that is not surrounded in the mind of the reader by the rainbow of suggestion. Just as the gods draped the human form to give desire imagination, so, perhaps, some god and no fate has all but hidden the mind of Sappho. III Looking at it in another way one might fancy that all the demons of malignity and destruction had conspired to destroy and traduce: to destroy the works and traduce the character of the poet. The game of defamation was begun in Athens in the age of corruption by lepers, and carried on through the succeeding ages by their kind, till Welcker came with his torch and showed these gibbering ghosts standing on nothing and with nothing in their hands. Colonel Mure tried to put Welcker's torch out, and only burned his fingers. Comparetti snuffed it, only to make it burn the brighter. But bright or dim, the torch was only intended to show the lepers. Sappho shines by her own light in the minutest fragments of her that remain--Fragments whose deathless energy, like the energy of radium, has vivified literature in all ages and times. IV The mind of Sappho runs through all literature like a spangled thread. THE HYMN TO APHRODITE AND FIFTY-TWO FRAGMENTS, TOGETHER WITH SAPPHO TO PHAON, OVID'S HEROIC EPISTLE XV FOREWORD Tear the red rose to pieces if you will, The soul that is the rose you may not kill; Destroy the page, you may, but not the words That share eternal life with flowers and birds. And the least words of Sappho--let them fall, Cast where you will, some bird will rise and call, Some flower unfold in some forsaken spot. Hill hyacinth, or blue forget-me-not. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION FOREWORD