If we turn now from the praise of the ancients to modern literary critics of classic lore we shall not find any depredation but rather an enhancing of that ancient praise. The classic estimate of Sappho holds its own and more than holds it to-day. J. A. K. Thomson in his _Greeks and Barbarians_[23] says: “Landor is not Greek any more than Leconte de Lisle is Greek ... they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which makes Sappho so different.” Mackail speaks of “the feeling expressed in splendid but hardly exaggerated language by Swinburne, in that early poem where, alone among the moderns, he has mastered and all but reproduced one of her favourite metres, the Sapphic stanza which she invented and to which she gave her name”— Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion! All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish, Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo; Fear was upon them, While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not. Ah, the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent, None endured the sound of her song for weeping; Laurel by laurel, Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead ... Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever. Swinburne himself was thoroughly steeped in Sappho whom he considered “the supreme success, the final achievement of the poetic art.” He laid abounding tribute at her feet both in verse and prose. In an appreciation first published posthumously in 1914 in _The Living Age_,[24] he says: “Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison _the very greatest poet that ever lived_. Aeschylus is the greatest poet who ever was also a prophet; Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who ever was also a poet, but Sappho is simply nothing less—as she is certainly nothing more—than the greatest poet who ever was at all. Such at least is the simple and sincere profession of my lifelong faith.” Alfred Noyes recognizes in Swinburne’s praise of Sappho a spirit which would make them congenial companions in another world, when in the poem _In Memory of Swinburne_ he writes: Thee, the storm-bird, nightingale-souled, Brother of Sappho, the seas reclaim! Age upon age have the great waves rolled Mad with her music, exultant, aflame; Thee, thee too, shall their glory enfold, Lit with thy snow-winged fame. Back, thro’ the years, fleets the sea-bird’s wing: Sappho, of old time, once,—ah, hark! So did he love her of old and sing! Listen, he flies to her, back thro’ the dark! Sappho, of old time, once.... Yea, Spring Calls him home to her, hark!