a sort of tessera evidently left there to be fitted in whenever a favourable blank presented itself; we find it, without the smallest change of language, fixed in the middle of the poem. It is noticeable that the fragment "In her high place in Paphos" is now utilized.
A storm of excitement presently ruffles the poet, and he turns the sheet in such agitation that he holds it upside-down. Without leading up to it in any way, he starts a passage
She came and touched me, saying "Who doth thee wrong, Sappho?"
which closes abruptly with lines which may be cited because they contain several of the very rare instances in which the draft slightly differs verbally from the text of 1866:
Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?
"Be of good cheer, wilt thou forget?" she said:
"For she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
For she shall give thee gifts that will not take,
Shall kiss that will not kiss thee" (yea, kiss me)
"When I would not, etc."
We presently come across the only Couplet in the whole poem which was cancelled in the first draft, and yet reappears in the published text. This is:
Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods,
The young men and the maidens and the gods,
now very effectively introduced into the argument, but in the first draft destroyed with a whirling movement of the pen, so that it looks as if a dust-storm involved it. Written with frenzied violence, almost perpendicularly, the draft then presents a couplet:
Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fine
The moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine,
for which a place is now found immediately before the "Bound with her myrtles" couplet. The ecstasy of the poet seems to have suddenly flagged here, and there follows immediately, in sedate script, with even lines, the passage