Her petals are a screen
Of pink and quivering green,
For Cupid when he sleeps,
Or for mild Zephyrus, who laughs and weeps.
'Sappho loves flowers with a personal sympathy,' writes Professor F. T. Palgrave. "Cretan girls," she says, "with their soft feet dancing lay flat the tender bloom of the grass" [fr. [54]]: she feels for the hyacinth "which shepherds on the mountain tread under foot, and the purple flower is on the ground" [fr. [94]]: she pities the wood-doves (apparently) as their "life grows cold and their wings fall" before the archer' [fr. [16]].
147
Himerius says:—
'These gifts of yours must now be likened to those of the leader of the Muses himself, as Sappho and Pindar, in an ode, adorn him with golden hair and lyres, and attend him with a team of swans to Helicon while he dances with Muses and Graces; or as poets inspired by the Muses crown the Bacchanal (for thus the lyre calls him, meaning Dionȳsos), when Spring has just flashed out for the first time, with Spring flowers and ivy-clusters, and lead him, now to the topmost heights of Caucasus and vales of Lydia, now to the cliffs of Parnassus and the rock of Delphi, while he leaps and gives his female followers the note for the Evian tune.'
148
Eustathius says:—