And little we remember now the dryads and the wood,
And only old philosophers and foolish dreamers know
What lady lived in Lesbos a weary time ago.
Even as this book goes to press, Tristram Tupper issues his novel, Adventuring (Doran Co., N. Y., 1923), in which Sappho is discovered even down in the valley of the Shenandoah:
“On such a night Jay Singleton discovered the most beloved singer of all the ages. Not in the Lesbian starlit dusk, nor yet in the golden-sandaled dawn, but beneath a smoky lamp in the valley of the Shenandoah. Found her in a book. And he liked the cut of her verses—three pentameters followed by a dipody; and he liked the cut of her clothes—sort of loose and careless before the Christian era. ‘No use falling in love,’ said Jay Singleton to himself. ‘She sang her songs six hundred years B.C.’
“But he pored over another fragment, translated another quatrain, looked up each word, strung them together, made a kind of rime. In a word, Jay Singleton tried to improve a bit on the inimitable Sappho. And that night out on his porch where no one could hear, not even at the post office quarter of a mile away, he struck the strings of his guitar and he sang this surprising Sapphic:
Man is peer of gods in those moments after
Love has silenced song and has banished laughter;
Then—to her who smiles at him softly through tears—
He has no peers.