Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[306] models, to whom nearly all their metres have been traced back. Horace wrote of Alcaeus: “The Lesbian poet sang of war amid the din of arms, or when he had bound the storm-tossed ship to the moist shore, he sang of Bacchus, and the Muses, of Venus and the boy who clings forever by her side, and of Lycus, beautiful with his black hair and black eyes.” ¹ But the name of the Greek singer is still better preserved to Anglo-Saxons through an imitation of a single fragment by Sir William Jones,--the noble poem beginning “What constitutes a state?” It is worth while to remember that we owe these fine lines to the lover of Sappho. And indeed the poems of Alcaeus, so far as they remain, show much of the grace and elegance of Horace, joined with a far more heroic tone. His life was spent amid political convulsions, in which he was prominent, and, in spite of his fine verses, it is suspected, from the evidence remaining, that he was a good deal of a fop and not much of a soldier; and it is perhaps as well that the lady did not smile upon him, even in verse.

Their loves rest, after all, rather on tradition than on direct evidence; for there remain to us only two verses which Alcaeus addressed to Sappho. The one is a compliment, the other an apology. The compliment is found in one graceful line, which is perhaps her best description :--

Violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho.

The freshness of those violets, the charm of that smile, the assurance of that purity, all rest upon this one line, and securely rest. If every lover, having thus said in three epithets the whole story about his mistress, would be content to retire into oblivion, and add no more, what a comfort