and one beautiful line which we can recognise in the translation by Catullus,

     “Like a child after its mother, I—­”

The touches by which she has painted nature are so fine and delicate that the only poet of our time who has a right to attempt to translate them has declared it to be “the one impossible task.”  Our English does, indeed, sound harsh and unmusical as we try to represent her words; yet what a picture is here—­

     “And round about the cold (stream) murmurs through the
     apple-orchards, and slumber is shed down from trembling leaves.”

She makes us hear the wind upon the mountains falling on the oaks; she makes us feel the sun’s radiance and beauty, as it glows through her verses; she makes us love with her the birds and the flowers that she loved.  She has a womanly pity not only for the dying doves when—­

     “Their hearts grew cold and they dropped their wings,”

but for the hyacinth which the shepherds trample under foot upon the hillside.  The golden pulse growing on the shore, the roses, the garlands of dill, are yet fragrant for us; we can even now catch the sweet tones of the “Spring’s angel,” as she calls it, the nightingale that sang in Lesbos ages and ages ago.  One beautiful fragment has been woven with another into a few perfect lines by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; but it shall be given here as it stands.  It describes a young, unwedded maiden: 

     “As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough, the very end
     of the bough which the gatherers overlooked—­nay, overlooked not,
     but could not reach.”

The Ode to Aphrodite and the fragment to Anaktoria are too often found in translations to be quoted here.  Indeed, it is of but little use to quote; for Sappho can be known only in her own language and by those who will devote time to these inestimable fragments.  Their beauty grows upon us as we read; we catch in one the echo of a single tone, so sweet that it needs no harmony; and again a few stray chords that haunt the ear and fill us with an exquisite dissatisfaction; and yet again a grave and stately measure such as her rebuke to Alkaeus—­

     “Had thy desire been for what was good or noble and had not thy
     tongue framed some evil speech, shame had not filled thine eyes—­”

MARY GREY.

THE SILENT CHIMES.

RINGING AT MIDDAY.

It was an animated scene; and one you only find in England.  The stubble of the cornfields looked pale and bleak in the departing autumn, the wind was shaking down the withered leaves from the trees, whose thinning branches told unmistakably of the rapidly-advancing winter.  But the day was bright after the night’s frost, and the sun shone on the glowing scarlet coats of the hunting men, and the hounds barked in every variety of note and leaped with delight in the morning air.  It was the first run of the season, and the sportsmen were fast gathering at the appointed spot—­a field flanked by a grove of trees called Poachers’ Copse.