Thee too the years shall cover; thou shalt be As the rose born of one same blood with thee, As a song sung, as a word said, and fall Flower-wise, and be not any more at all, Nor any memory of thee anywhere; For never Muse has bound above thine hair The high Pierian flower whose graft outgrows All Summer kinship of the mortal rose And colour of deciduous days, nor shed Reflex and flush of heaven above thine head, etc. The Aphrodite hymn which he paraphrased in _Anactoria_ is used again in _Songs of the Spring-tides_: O thou of divers-coloured mind, O thou Deathless, God’s daughter subtle-souled ... Child of God, close craftswoman, I beseech thee; Bid not ache nor agony break nor master, Lady, my spirit. (_On the Cliffs_) In the same poem the mature Swinburne comes closer than in his youth to Sappho, when he says: “The tawny sweet-winged thing, Whose cry was but of spring.” But even in this poem he dilutes Sappho’s one line into six or more: ‘I loved thee’—hark, one tenderer note than all— ‘Atthis, of old time once’—one low long fall, Sighing—one long low lovely loveless call, Dying—one pause in song so flamelike fast— ‘Atthis, long since in old time overpast’— One soft first pause and last. We cannot take leave of Swinburne without paying tribute to his Sapphics. English and American poets in general have not been successful with the Sapphic strophe, though in modern times Canning’s _Needy Knife-grinder_ is a good specimen; and Tennyson caught the real Greek cadence in his specimen: Faded every violet, all the roses; Gone the glorious promise, and the victim Broken in this anger of Aphrodite Yields to the victor. Many have experimented with the Sapphic stanza, as recently Clinton Scollard and Thomas S. Jones, Jr., in their _Sapphics_. TO A HILL-TOWN (Last two stanzas) Sighing winds and crooning of gentle waters; Ilex boughs that tremble with tender music,— Nightingales that sing in the scented gloaming,— These for thee, Sappho! Immortelles and chaplets of crimson roses,— Roses loved of thee and beloved of Lesbos,— Plaintive notes of lyres and the tears of lovers, These for thee, Sappho! (T. S. J.) TO THE LESBIAN You, who first unloosed from the winds their burden On that lyre of magical trembling heart-strings, Merged within all sorrow and human gladness— So sang for all time: Do you never still through the drifting shadows Seek unseen the ways that you loved in Lesbos,— Or alone for song’s everlasting splendor Were you made mortal? (T. S. J.)