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are several of these fragments; one of which I quote for its exceeding grace, though it consists of only two lines :
Sweet mother, I can weave the web no more;
So much I love the youth, so much I lingering love.
But this last adjective, so effective to the ear, is, after all, an interpolation.
It should be:--
So much I love the youth, by Aphrodite's charm.
Percival also translates one striking fragment whose few short lines seem to toll like a bell, mourning the dreariness of a forgotten tryst, on which the moon and stars look down.
I should render it thus:--
The moon is down;
And I've watched the dying
Of the Pleiades;
'T is the middle night,
The hour glides by,
And alone I'm sighing.
Percival puts it in blank verse, more smoothly:--
The moon is set; the Pleiades are gone;
'T is the mid-noon of-night; the hour is by,
And yet I watch alone.
There are some little fragments of verse addressed by
Sappho to the evening star, which are supposed to have suggested the celebrated lines of
Byron; she says,--
O Hesperus, thou bringest all things,
Thou bringest wine, thou bringest [home] the goat,
To the mother thou bringest the child.
Again she says, with a touch of higher imagination,--
Hesperus, bringing home all that the light-giving morning has scattered.
Grammarians have quoted this line to illustrate the derivation
