OF A RECENTLY DISCOVERED FRAGMENT[1] OF A POEM BY SAPPHO.
Thou’rt like the apple—maiden young and fair— That sees its fellows gathered, one by one, While, on the topmost bough, though ripe and rare, It unmolested sits and blooms alone: Forgotten? No—a mark for every eye, But for the gazer’s longing hand too high.
[1] Published in Walz, Rhetor. Græc. 8. 883.
The princes of the night came, one by one, into the halls of Heaven, and each, from his refulgent throne, sped far and wide through space his beams of glory. The earth saw the regal train, and rejoiced, saying, “I am their sister;” then the shadows passed away from her bosom, and she stood in radiance amid her starry compeers, sending back ray for ray.
“My Lillian, let us look upon the night,” cried Kenneth—and he led her forth beneath the stars. They smiled upon the maid, and crowned her forehead with their beams, and her beauty grew as lofty and mysterious as their own.
The pair walked in silence, for each bosom throbbed heavily, with its burden of unspoken love; they walked in silence, for youth was in flushing, and they heeded not the speeding hours.
First Kenneth spoke, for man must _act_ while woman muses, and the spells of night oppressed him.
“Look, Lillian, on the shining orbs above us, circling their mysterious round! Knowest thou, the starry firmament is a vast prophecy of things to be? Yon burning record of the decrees of fate rolls its stupendous riddles in mighty round, and mock our earnest inquiry. The learning of the Magi, the ‘Persians starry wit,’ may catch but faint and far-off glimpses of the truths they blazon yet conceal. The boasted lore of the Chaldean, reads but imperfectly their dim revealings, while the Gheber, wiser in his ignorance than either, bows in worship to the celestial mysteries he presumeth not to compass or comprehend.”
There was a majesty and gloom in the boy’s conceptions that charmed and oppressed fair Lillian; and, as woman is prone to do, she turned from all the rolling worlds of which he spoke, to the deep, silent, and no less enigmatical world of her own heart.
He looked again upon the heavens on which was written, as he believed, the fate of nations, while her meek eyes followed his, striving to read from the jeweled scroll, her own doom.