And when we remember that the poetry, thus created, imbodying the most vivid, popular, animated subjects of interest, was united with all the pomp of festival and show--all the grandest, the most elaborate, and artful effects of music--we may understand why the true genius of lyrical composition has passed for ever away from the modern world.
As early as between 708 and 665 B.C., Archilochus brought to perfection a poetry worthy of loftier passions than those which mostly animated his headstrong and angry genius.

In 625 (thirty-one years before the legislation of Solon) flourished Arion, the Lesbian, who, at Corinth, carried, to extraordinary perfection the heroic adaptation of song to choral music.

In 611 flourished the Sicilian, Stersichorus -- no unworthy rival of Arion; while simultaneously, in strains less national and Grecian, and more resembling the inspiration of modern minstrels, Alcaeus vented his burning and bitter spirit;--and Sappho (whose chaste and tender muse it was reserved for the chivalry of a northern student, five-and-twenty centuries after the hand was cold and the tongue was mute, to vindicate from the longest-continued calumny that genius ever endured) [177] gave to the most ardent of human passions the most delicate colouring of female sentiment.
Perhaps, of all that Greece has bequeathed to us, nothing is so perfect in its concentration of real feeling as the fragments of Sappho.

In one poem of a few lines--nor that, alas! transmitted to us complete--she has given a picture of the effect of love upon one who loves, to which volumes of the most eloquent description could scarcely add a single new touch of natural pathos--so subtle is it, yet so simple.

I cannot pass over in silence the fragments of Mimnermus (fl.