SAPPHO.

THE name of Sappho is almost identical in the mind with the word Poetess. Hundreds of women have written verse; but of the very few women who have attained the renown of living to posterity as worthy to bear the honoured title of poetess, Sappho ranks preeminent. She stands at the head of that select sisterhood privileged to take place among those upon whom Wordsworth invokes

divine favour:

"Blessings be with them—and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares,-
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight, by heavenly lays!"

Raphael, prince of painters, has given Sappho a conspicuous position in his picture of "Mount Parnassus :"-She is seated on the lefthand front; her beautiful plain face looking up in eager intelligence towards a group of Earth's greatest poets. It was a piece

of fine taste in Raphael, thus placing the woman-poet as it were at the foot of those grand men, with her eyes turned in sympathetic spirit up among them.

To Sappho was awarded the exalted distinction of being called