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subsequent Greek poetry and art,-to keep it pure and high, above sensuality and above sentimentalism.

The character of Sappho's work may be thus summed up: Take Homer's unstudied directness, Dante's intensity without his mysticism, Keats's sensibility without his sensuousness, Burns's masculine strength, and Lady Nairne's exquisite pathos, that goes straight to the heart and stays there, and you have Sappho. What a darkened world it must have been that allowed such poetry as hers to be lost! And yet it is not all lost. Enough remains to show us the extent of our loss; and of it we may say, in the words of the ancient epigram: "Sappho's white, speaking pages of dear song Yet linger with us, and will linger long.»

Shavar Davidpr

TH

TO APHRODITE

HOU of the throne of many changing hues,
Immortal Venus, artful child of Jove,—
Forsake me not, O Queen, I pray! nor bruise
My heart with pain of love.

But hither come, if e'er from other home

Thine ear hath heard mine oft-repeated calls;
If thou hast yoked thy golden car and come,
Leaving thy father's halls;

If ever fair, fleet sparrows hastened forth,

And swift on wheeling pinions bore thee nigher,
From heights of heaven above the darkened earth,
Down through the middle fire.

Ay, swift they came; then, Blessed One, didst thou
With countenance immortal smile on me,
And ask me what it was that ailed me now,
And why I called on thee;

And what I most desired should come to pass,

To still my soul inspired: "Whom dost thou long

To have Persuasion lead to thine embrace?

Who, Sappho, does thee wrong?

"For if she flee, she quickly shall pursue;

If gifts she take not, gifts she yet shall bring; And if she love not, love shall thrill her through, Though strongly combating."

Then come to me even now, and set me free

From sore disquiet; and that for which I sigh With fervent spirit, bring to pass for me:

Thyself be mine ally!

Translation of Thomas Davidson.

I

TO THE BELOVED

HOLD him as the gods above,

The man who sits before thy feet,

And, near thee, hears thee whisper sweet,

And brighten with the smiles of love.

Thou smiledst: like a timid bird

My heart cowered fluttering in its place.

I saw thee but a moment's space,
And yet I could not frame a word.

My tongue was broken; 'neath my skin
A subtle flame shot over me;

And with my eyes I could not see;
My ears were filled with whirling din.

And then I feel the cold sweat pour,

Through all my frame a trembling pass;
My face is paler than the grass:
To die would seem but little more.

Translation of Thomas Davidson.

FRANCISQUE SARCEY

(1828-)

ANY important first night, and on many unimportant ones, in the theatres of Paris will be noticed among the most

attentive spectators a short, stout, comfortable-looking old gentleman, with a white beard, a high color, and shrewd eyes. It is Francisque Sarcey. For more than thirty years, his has been a position of special distinction among the critics of France concerning themselves particularly with French dramatic literature and the French drama. No writer on these topics has so large an audience, and one of such distinctively popular character. Of

the old school of critics, and of many oldfashioned convictions; at swords' points with many brother commentators and journalists on questions of theatrical art, and of that theatrical article the play; the object of much good-natured ridicule (of some by no means as good-natured as it might be),seen everywhere and known everywhere in the dramatic movement of the capital, and continually putting himself in close touch. with a wide provincial public by either his lectures or his notices,-M. Sarcey easily overtops in authority many new and brilliant confrères. He has been a voluminous writer; he has been an incessant lecturer; and special gifts for maintaining the courage of his convictions from the first have marked him in both capacities.

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FRANCISQUE SARCEY

M. Sarcey was born in 1828 at Dourdan, in the Department of the Seine-et-Oise. He was an honor-pupil in the famous Charlemagne School in Paris; and when pursuing his studies in the École Normale in 1848, his fellow-students were About and Taine. His lively spirits and independent ideas brought him into trouble when he was serving the Department of Public Instruction at Chaumont. He quitted the school-teacher's desk for the newspaper office. In 1859 he began critical work on the Figaro. He made a business of studying the drama and dramatic criticism. He passed from the Figaro to various other journals. Finally he became a permanent member of the staff

of Le Temps. To that well-known and influential newspaper he contributes one or two articles every week in the year. The platform is also still his avocation; and his critical talks, delivered with a charmingly colloquial manner,—a manner entirely in accord with his theories of what a lecture should be,- are among the best attended on the part of a public not too fond of that particular method of receiving critical impressions.

M. Sarcey is not merely a specialist in the drama, and in the art of acting: he is a man of fine and wide literary and artistic education. He has a style which is like himself: clear, nervous, direct, with touches of humor, and with occasionally the grace of true sentiment, but utterly opposed to the formalism which is to many writers the only critical expression. He writes as he speaks,-off-hand, yet never in a slipshod fashion. He has much humor, but always in good taste. He believes in tradition on the stage; and in the making of stage plays, he likes the melodrama better than the modern literary play. He abhors the drama in which plot is not supreme; he hates the faddists and the symbolists. His sense of himself is strong but never offensive. He is respected as a philosopher of the play-house and the play. His very weaknesses are so much a part of himself that he would not be "Our Uncle Sarcey" without them; so no one wishes them away. Past his middle years, he writes with the youthfulness of a man of twenty-five, united with the vast experience and the maturity of a Nestor of the French theatre. His reputation is international. All the world reads him, and nowhere else in the world is there to be found a critic quite like him.

HOW A LECTURE IS PREPARED

From 'Recollections of Middle Life.' Copyright 1893, by Charles Scribner's

Sons

HEN you have taken all your notes, when you have possessed

W1
W yourselves of at least the substance of all the ideas of

which the lecture is to be composed,-whether you have them already arranged in fine order, or in the mass, still confused, seething in your mind; when you have reached the moment of preparation, when you no longer seek anything but the turn to give them, the clearest, the most vivid and picturesque manner in which to express them: when you are so far,-mind, my friend, never commit the imprudence of seating yourself at your desk, your notes or your book under your eyes, a pen in your

hand. If you live in the country, you doubtless have a bit of a garden at your disposal; and in default of an alley of trees belonging to you, a turn around the town where no one passes. If you are a Parisian, you have in the neighborhood either the Luxembourg or the Tuileries, or the Parc Monceau, or in any case some wide and solitary street where you can dream in the open air without too much interruption. If you have nothing of all this, or if the weather be execrable, you have in your house a room larger than the others: get up and walk. A lecture is never prepared except while walking. The movement of the body lashes the blood and aids the movement of the mind.

You have possessed your memory of the themes from the development of which the lecture must be formed: pick out one from the pile,- - the first at hand, or the one you have most at heart, which for the moment attracts you most, and act as if you were before the public; improvise upon it. Yes, force yourself to improvise. Do not trouble yourself about badly constructed phrases, nor inappropriate words-go your way. Push on to the end of the development, and the end once reached, recommence the same exercise; recommence it three times, four times, ten times, without tiring. You will have some trouble at first; the development will be short and meagre: little by little around the principal theme there will group themselves accessory ideas or convincing facts, or pat anecdotes that will extend and enrich it. Do not stop in this work until you notice that in thus taking up the same theme you fall into the same development; and that this development, with its turns of language and order of phrases, fixes itself in your memory.

For, what is the purpose of the exercise that I recommend to you? To prepare for you a wide and fertile field of terms and phrases upon the subject that you are to treat. You have the idea: you must seek the expression. You fear that words and forms of phrase will fail you. A considerable number must be accumulated in advance; it is a store of ammunition with which you provide yourself for the great day. If you commit the imprudence of charging your memory with a single development which must be definitive, you will fall into all the inconveniences that I have brought to your attention: the effect is that of reciting a lesson, and that is chilling; the memory may fail, you lose the thread, and are pulled up short; the phrase has no longer that air of negligence which improvisation alone gives, and which

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