_Marseillaise_ and _Die Wacht am Rhein_ act upon nations in modern days. Archilochus of Paros, soured by his own failings and misfortunes, wrote often in bitterness, like Burns. He is styled an “iambic” writer from a new form of composition which he employed, and he became the first great name in satire. In Lesbos, a fertile, luxurious, and cultured island, we meet with the foremost name in the poetry of passion, the famous Sappho, the first and greatest of women in literature. It is Sappho who could paint, better than poet has ever painted since, the agonizing of love. Nor was she alone. In the same island she had her school of followers, and, separately from these, the poet Alcaeus poured forth his fiery thoughts in “words that burn.” But it is Sappho who, like George Sand, wrote from the “real blood of her heart and the real flame of her thought” things which have been the despair of imitator or translator. Unhappily, very little of her work is extant now, even in fragments; but what there is, is “more golden than gold.” Her metres are as nobly simple as in one of Herrick’s songs; her words are simple also. Yet, just as Dante could make a mighty verse out of the noun and verb, by choosing for his noun and verb the absolutely truest and most home-coming, so the simplicity of Sappho is only a deceptive covering for the most consummate art. Often as our lyrists have tried to catch something of her sacred fire, never has one quite attained to her irresistible pathos. Perhaps he who has approached nearest is Burns. Sappho is untranslatable. All absolutely best words in any language must be so. The nearest equivalent in English may be sought and found for the best word in the Greek, but in the special quality of its music or its associations it can never be the same. The names of Pindar and Simonides are of a later date. Before them comes another, who sang to the lyre those gemlike songs of love, and joy, and wine, which the cavalier poets of the English seventeenth century made their ideal. This was Anacreon of Teos. “Anacreontics” is the name given to those polished cameo-like little poems which imitators have essayed upon Anacreon’s themes. Cowley’s translations into English verse are known to literature, and readers familiar with the works of Thomas Moore will remember his loose youthful version of a few true and many spurious lyrics of the Teian bard. It is to Anacreon that we may look for the prototype of those graceful trifles called _vers de société_, and of those songs of love or gaiety which Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, and Waller have developed in such exquisite examples. All this personal poetry was meant to be sung to the accompaniment of lyre or flute. Had it been primarily meant to be read, it might possibly, even with Greek creators, have been less simple and direct, more artificial.