The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III

iously. Anacreon says, for instance, that love clave him with an axe, like a smith; but it seems far more likely that the reference is to the affection excited by some charming youth.[1] We have a specimen remaining of the nonchalant style in which he addressed a woman, in the ode commencing "O Thracian mare!"--Schneidewin, Poet. Lyr. Anac. fr. 47.

The great poet of Love was not Anacreon, but Sappho, whose heart and mind were both of the finest. Her life is involved in obscurity, but it is probable that she was a strong advocate of woman's rights in her own land; and as she found men falling in love with other men, so she took special pains to win the affections of the young Æolian ladies, to train them in all the accomplishments suited to woman's nature, and to initiate them into the art of poetry,--that art without which, she says, a woman's memory would be for ever forgotten, and she would go to the house of Hades, to dwell with the shadowy dead, uncared for and unknown. We have two poems of h