be studied in their stead and the morals of the people thereby improved. Of
the efficacy of this act no means of judging has come down to us.

In recent years there has arisen a great body of literature upon the
subject of Sappho, most of it the abstruse work of scholars writing for
scholars. But the gist of it all, together with the minutest surviving
fragment of her verse, has been made available to the general reader in
English by Mr. Henry T. Wharton, in whose altogether admirable little
volume we find all that is known and the most apposite of all that has been
said up to the present day about

"Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song's priestess, mad with joy and pain of love."

Perhaps the most perilous and the most alluring venture in the whole field
of poetry is that which Mr. Carman has undertaken in attempting to give us
in English verse those lost poems of Sappho of which fragments have
survived. The task is obviously not one of translation or of paraphrasing,
but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction. It is
as if a sculptor of to-day were to set himself, with reverence, and trained
craftsmanship, and studious familiarity with the spirit, technique, and
atmosphere of his subject, to restore some statues of Polyclitus or
Praxiteles of which he had but a broken arm, a foot, a knee, a finger upon
which to build. Mr. Carman's method, apparently, has been to imagine each
lost lyric as discovered, and then to translate it; for the indefinable
flavour of the translation is maintained throughout, though accompanied by
the fluidity and freedom of purely original work.

C.G.D. ROBERTS.