And who by wealth or selfish guile became the island’s proudest peer? What siren with voluptuous wile Was potent at the royal ear? Who gained renown with sword and spear? Their fame is dust beneath the feet Of Time, and she alone is dear Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.” Our joy is sadder than the smile Of grief that cannot shed a tear; Our lives are like a little mile Marked on the orbit of a sphere; The wisdom that we most revere Is mixed with folly and defeat: Her laurel never can grow sere Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.” ENVOI From out that pallid atmosphere Where dawn and darkness vaguely meet, Comes but her lark-note cool and clear Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.” I have quoted enough to discredit “The King of the Black Isles” who in the _Line O’Type_ of the _Chicago Tribune_ for November, 1922, publishes a poem with the alliterative caption, _A Lady Lived in Lesbos_.[188] The last of the three stanzas is: We have forgotten beauty and all our goods are good, And little we remember now the dryads and the wood, And only old philosophers and foolish dreamers know What lady lived in Lesbos a weary time ago. Even as this book goes to press, Tristram Tupper issues his novel, _Adventuring_ (Doran Co., N. Y., 1923), in which Sappho is discovered even down in the valley of the Shenandoah: “On such a night Jay Singleton discovered the most beloved singer of all the ages. Not in the Lesbian starlit dusk, nor yet in the golden-sandaled dawn, but beneath a smoky lamp in the valley of the Shenandoah. Found her in a book. And he liked the cut of her verses—three pentameters followed by a dipody; and he liked the cut of her clothes—sort of loose and careless before the Christian era. ‘No use falling in love,’ said Jay Singleton to himself. ‘She sang her songs six hundred years B.C.’ “But he pored over another fragment, translated another quatrain, looked up each word, strung them together, made a kind of rime. In a word, Jay Singleton tried to improve a bit on the inimitable Sappho. And that night out on his porch where no one could hear, not even at the post office quarter of a mile away, he struck the strings of his guitar and he sang this surprising Sapphic: Man is peer of gods in those moments after Love has silenced song and has banished laughter; Then—to her who smiles at him softly through tears— He has no peers.