Larichus, and Anactoria deserted by Alcaeus for Sappho. Pittacus is one of Sappho’s suitors who quarrels with Alcaeus and in trying to strike him hits the slave Phaon. In the second act Sappho releases Phaon from his yoke and they flee from Alcaeus after Phaon has struck him with his spear. In the third act Phaon again strikes at Alcaeus, but this time hits his own boy. Thalassa, his wife, shows him his own dead child and so he returns to her, and the rejected Sappho springs into the misty sea. There are inappropriate prose interludes with a pantomime of the drunken Hercules. Sappho is here again not the real Sappho but the Sappho of tradition, which is rather strange, as several of Sappho’s fragments, by no means all that might have been suitable, are accurately and charmingly paraphrased. This shows that Mackaye knew the fragments of Sappho, but he has no real understanding of Sappho herself, for his Sappho is given to unrestrained love and she rejects a great poet and statesman for the married slave into whom Mackaye has transformed Phaon. I can quote only the very dramatic hymn to Poseidon and Aphrodite: God of the generations, pain, and death, I bow to thee. Not for love’s sake is love’s Fierce happiness, but for the after-race. Yet, thou eternal Watcher of the tides, Knowing their passions, tell me! Why must we Rapturous beings of the spray and storm That, chanting, beat our hearts against thy shores Of aspiration—ebb? ebb and return Into the songless deep? are we no more Than foam upon thy garment? Another wave has broken at your feet And, moaning, wanes into oblivion. But not its radiance. That flashes back Into the morning, and shall flame again Over a myriad waves. That flame am I, Nor thou, Poseidon, shalt extinguish me. My spirit is thy changeling, and returns To her, who glows beyond the stars of birth— To her, who is herself time’s passion star. Many individual American poems have also taken the title or themes from Sappho. Oliver Wendell Holmes refers to her in the fourth stanza of _The Voiceless_: Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O’er Sappho’s memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On nameless sorrow’s churchyard pillow. (_The Atlantic Monthly_, Oct. 1858) Samuel Latham Mitchill (1764-1831) reflects Sappho’s love of the rose in an imaginary dialogue between Sappho and her younger contemporary from Samos, Pythagoras: PYTHAGORAS AND SAPPHO, _or_ THE DIAMOND AND THE ROSE Long time ago, ’tis well expressed, Pythagoras the seer This question artfully addressed To beauteous Sappho’s ear: “When hence thou shalt be forced to flee, By transmigration’s power, Wouldst thou indeed prefer to be A jewel or a flower?”