PART OF BOOK IV. ODE 9. A FRAGMENT. LEST you should think that verse shall die, Though daring Milton sits sublime, Sages and chiefs long since had birth, Those raised new empires o'er the earth, And these new heavens and systems framed. Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride: 5 10 In vain they schemed, in vain they bled: 15 6 In Spenser native Muses play. This praise is not of either the most discriminating, or the loftiest order: yet Spenser was an established favorite of Pope. Spence records his saying, 'There is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in age as in youth: I read the Fairy Queen' when I was about twelve, with a vast deal of delight; and I think it gave me as much, when I read it over about a year or two ago.' SAPPHO TO PHAON. OVID's epistles, and a single epistle by Propertius, seem to be the only relics of this style left to us by antiquity: yet that a style so easy must have been common, and so fit for the expression of poetic feeling must have been popular, we can scarcely hesitate to believe. With classic names exciting curiosity, and classic adventures possessing the ready interest of romance, the poet found the field which poetry loves, and might expatiate without restraint in all the floridness of imagery, and wander through all the heights and depths of the enamored mind. Whether we are to regret the loss, or rejoice that so much sentiment was left untouched for the feelings or the fame of later poets, there is strong probability that the ruins of the Greek and Roman libraries, in the convulsions of the empire, involved a vast quantity of this minor literature of the ancient world. But if antiquity have given its treasures to decay, or hidden them under the ruins of Herculaneum, the genius of modern times has amply atoned for the deficiency in number, if not in excellence. Italy, England, and perhaps every other country of Europe, have supplied their heroic epistles ;' and from Bruni's volume, in 1636, illustrated by the pencils of Guido and Dominichino, to Drayton and Pope, the loves and sorrows of celebrated names have been sung in every language, from the line to the pole. The history of Sappho is brief and uncertain: if we are to rely on tradition, in early life she was unconscious of her genius: she married: on the death of her husband, she probably wandered through the islands, as was the custom of poets at the time; and commenced a career of poetry. Love, a popular theme of poets in all ages, was her chief subject; and she was soon famed for the richness, ardor, and depth of her conceptions. Of the works of years, but a 'Hymn to Venus,' two epigrams, and the famous ode, with some fragments of lines, have reached us. The ode is brief, but exhibits all the features of the most consuming passion : it is perhaps the finest condensation of powerful images of human feeling ever transmitted by poetry; but it is passion wrought up to the verge of frenzy. This temperature may account for some of the eccentricities which have stained the female fame of Sappho, and urged her extraordinary and theatric death by the leap from the Leucadian rock. There she came robed as a devotee of Apollo, and, with harp in hand, plunged into the sea. No death could have been more congenial to the frame of mind indicated by her poetry: it was the death of a lover of applause, of a flaming heart, of a memory living on ardent thoughts, and of a mad woman! |