and there unhappily the record deserts us.” These lovely lines are about as well known as anything of Sappho’s, owing to Rossetti’s adaptation in his One Girl, a title altered in 1881 to Beauty, which the reader can find in Wharton. In modern times, Maurice Thompson, Gamaliel Bradford, and others have been influenced by them, though often an un-Sapphic touch not in Sappho’s verses is given, as in Bradford’s Topmost Bough:
Don’t you love me now,
After I have set you
On love’s topmost bough;
God, then I’ll forget you.
The bridegroom now bears off the bride while the chorus of youths praise the bride and the chorus of maidens the bridegroom:
What may I best compare,
Dear groom, with thee?
A slender sapling, ere
It is a tree.