SAPPHO IN CHIC-A-GO.
‘* Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, ’
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings,
Placard ‘‘ Removed ” and ‘‘ To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa’s gate and on Mount
Moriah,
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and
Italian collections,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits,
demands you.
Respoasive to our summons,
Or rather to her long-nurs’d inclination,
Join’d with an irresistible, natural gravitation,
She comes! I hear the rustling of her gown,
I scent the odour of her breath’s delicious fragrance,
I mark her step divine, her curious eyes a-turning, rolling,
Upon this very scene.
The dame of dames! can I believe then,
Those ancient temples, sculptures classic, could none of them retain her?
Nor shades of Virgil and Dante, nor myriad memories, poems, old associa-
tions, magnetize and hold on to her?
Yes, if you will allow me to say so,
I, my friends, if you do not, can plainly see her,
The same undying soul of earth’s, activity’s, beauty’s, heroism’s expression,
Out from her evolutions hither come, ended the strata of her former themes,
Hidden and cover’d by to-day’s, foundation of to-day’s,
Ended, deceas’d through time, her voice by Castaly’s fountain
Silent the broken-lipp’d Sphynx in Egypt, silent all these century-baffling
tombs,
Ended for aye the epics of Asia’s, Europe’s helmeted warriors, ended the
primitive call of the muses,
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