Of the fragments, also, while perhaps no previous attempt has been made to give an imaginative recast to so large a number of them, many have been incorporated by Swinburne in his “Anactoria,” and fugitive stanzas in the work of Rossetti, Tennyson, Byron, and others, attest this source. To refashion them, however, after the manner, as Mr. Roberts says in his introduction to the volume, of a sculptor restoring a statue by Praxiteles from the mere suggestion of a hand or a finger,—is a work of artistic imagination demanding the finest sympathy, taste, and kinship with the theme, as well as the poet’s touch to shape it; and while no one may pronounce upon the fidelity of the work, beyond its Greek spirit and command of the Sapphic metres, together with the interpretation of the original fragment, it has great charm of phrase and atmosphere and a certain pensive beauty even in the most impassioned stanzas, setting them to a different note from that usually met in Sapphic paraphrases; as in these lines: O heart of insatiable longing, What spell, what enchantment allures thee, Over the rim of the world With the sails of the sea-going ships? And when the rose petals are scattered At dead of still noon on the grass-plot, What means this passionate grief,— This infinite ache of regret?[1] Among the most familiar of the fragments is that of the “apple reddening upon the topmost bough,” which Rossetti has put into charming phrase, together with its companion verse upon the wild hyacinth; but while these lines are of haunting charm, they do not make a complete stanza, the comparison being unknown; whereas Mr. Carman, in recasting the fragment, has supplied a logical complement to the lines and symmetrized them, together with their companion illustration, to a lyric. His rendering, too, while less musical, from being unrhymed, is picturesque and concise, each word being made to tell as a stroke in a sketch: Art thou the topmost apple The gatherers could not reach, Reddening on the bough? Shall not I take thee? Art thou a hyacinth blossom The shepherds upon the hills Have trodden into the ground? Shall not I lift thee? The first Rossetti stanza ends with a fantastic play upon words explaining that, although the gatherers did not get the coveted apple, they Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now, which, although a pleasant poetical mix-up, is hardly in keeping with the dignity of the comparison, which dignity Mr. Carman has well preserved. Another fragment made familiar by adaptation is that to Hesperus, expanded by Byron into one of the great passages of “Don Juan.” Mr. Carman gives a more compact rendering and again brings the lines to such a close as shall render them a complete lyric. They scarcely vie in beauty with the Byron passage, which is one of the surest strokes of his hand, but have their own charm and grace: