I, too, in polar night Have hungered, gaunt and white, Alone amid the awful silences; And fled on gaudy fin, When the blue tides came in, Through coral gardens under tropic seas. And wheresoe’er I strove, The greater law was love, A faith too fine to falter or mistrust; There was no wanton greed, Depravity of breed, Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust. Nay, not till I was man, Learned I to scheme and plan The blackest depredation on my kind, Converting to my gain My fellow’s need and pain In chartered pillage, ruthless and refined. Therefore, my friends, I say Back to the fair sweet way Our Mother Nature taught us long ago,— The large primeval mood, Leisure and amplitude, The dignity of patience strong and slow. Let us go in once more By some blue mountain door, And hold communion with the forest leaves; Where long ago we trod The Ghost House of the God, Through orange dawns and amethystine eves! Then follows a glad picturing of the allurements of this place of return, a more thoughtful one of its requitals, and the infinitude of care bestowed upon every task to which the Master Craftsman sets his hand, and orbs into a vision of the soul enlarged by breathing the freer air and by regaining therefrom her “primal ecstasy and poise.” It traces also the soul’s commission, To fill her purport in the ampler plan. Altogether the Word is admirably expounded by Saint Kavin, and one is distinctly the gainer for having rested at his door to learn not only the grace of joyousness, but the means to that grace. In his latest work, constructing from the “fragments” of Sappho lyrics that should bear as close relation to the original as an imagination imbued with the Sapphic traditions and a temperament sympathetically Greek would enable him to do,—Mr. Carman undertook a daring task, but one whose promise he has made good, as poetry, however near it may approach to the imagined loveliness of those lost songs of the Lesbian, which have served by their haunting beauty to keep vital her memory through twenty-five centuries in which unnumbered names have gone to oblivion. Of the “Ode to Aphrodite,” the most complete Sapphic poem extant, many translations and paraphrases have been made, those by Edwin Arnold, John Addington Symonds, Ambrose Philips, Swinburne, etc., being among the finest; and were there space it would be interesting to show by comparison that Mr. Carman’s rendering of the Ode ranks well with the standard already set.