Undying, even beneath the wave,
Burn on thro’ time and ne’er expire,
a prophecy still true even in this materialistic day. Sappho, herself, had intimations of immortality, for she writes with perfect beauty and modesty:
Μνάσεσθαί τινά φαμι καὶ ὔστερον ἀμμέων
I say some one will think of us hereafter.
This brief, pellucid verse Swinburne in his Anactoria has distorted into the gorgeous emotional rhetoric of fourteen verses. But its own quiet prophecy stands good to-day. A fragment first published in 1922[2] also seems to make her say:
and yet great
glory will come to thee in all places
where Phaëthon [shines]