"Sappho" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the theologians pollution is synonymous with all pleasures with persons of the opposite or the same sex, which result in a waste of the elixir of life. In this sense, love between woman and woman is pollution and Sappho is a sinner ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung; Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Phobus rose and Delos sprung— Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all except their ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... now thirty-five years old: the Epodes had taught him his power over lyric verse. He had imitated at first the older Roman satirists; here by Maecenas' advice he copied from Greek models, from Alcaeus and Sappho, claiming ever afterwards with pride that he was the first amongst Roman poets to wed Aeolian lays to notes of Italy (Od. III, xxx, 13). He spent seven years in composing the first three Books of the Odes, which appeared in a single volume about B.C. 23. More than ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... a lily, had chosen "sunlight," and was a bonny little sun goddess. Lily Pearl, after a great deal of fuss and fidgeting had elected to go as Titania, and Helen essayed Oberon. Juno, who was very musical, made quite a stately Sappho. Little, sedate Marjorie was an Alaskan-Indian Princess, and Rosalie rigged up a Puck costume which made her irresistible. Isabel chose to be Portia, though that erudite lady seemed somewhat out of place among the mythological characters. But Stella ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... but am not quite satisfied with the poem even now. 'Shakespeare' I have re-written. 'Cruikshank' I have re-titled, and re-arranged the 'World's Triumphs.' 'Morality' I stick to—and 'Palladium' also. 'Second Best' I strike out and will try to put in 'Modern Sappho' instead—though the metre is not right. In the 'Voice' the falsetto rages too furiously; I can do nothing with it; ditto in 'Stagirius,' which I have struck out. Some half-dozen other things I either have struck out, or think of ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... us ask: Who was Jan Vermeer, or Van der Meer? "What songs did the sirens sing?" puzzled good old Sir Thomas Browne, and we know far more about William Shakespeare or Sappho or Memling than we do of the enigmatic man from Delft who died a double death in 1675; not only the death of the body, but the death of the spirit, of his immortal art. For several centuries he ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... SAPPHO, a lyric poetess of Greece of the 7th century B.C., and a contemporary of Alcaeus; was a woman of strong passions and of questionable morality, but of undoubted genius, her lyrics being among the masterpieces of antiquity, though only two of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the hall. "No;—that wasn't it," said Mrs. Spooner loudly. "I don't care what Dick said." Dick Rabbit was the first whip, and seemed to have been much exercised with the matter now under dispute. "The fox never went into Grobby Gorse at all. I was there and saw Sappho give him ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... times his age, and had a face like that picture of a lady over Sappho Smith's letters in ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... seeking the true, The good, and the beautiful, visits the Zoo, Where he chances on Sappho and Mr. Sardou, And Socrates, all with the same end ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... followed by an iambus. The line so formed is called an asclepiad, traditionally because it was invented by the Aeolian poet Asclepiades of Samos. Choriambic verse was first used by the poets of the Greek islands, and Sappho, in particular, produced magnificent effects with it. The measure, as used by the early Greeks, is essentially lyrical and impassioned. Mingled with other metres, it was constantly serviceable in choral writing, to which it was believed to give a stormy and mysterious ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... that you won't hear me explain that I had no more notion of your being on this ship than of Sappho being here!" ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... realms of the supernatural, the only great name that the student will find among the musical women of Greece is that of Sappho. The story of her life is known only in its general outlines, and even these have been the subject of many learned disputes. She was born near the close of the seventh century B.C., either at Mytilene or at Eresos in the island of Lesbos. She grew to maturity at ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... where they were written. The Hebrew is almost our only example of the tongue at its period, but it is not a literary language in any case. The Greek of the New Testament is not the Eolic, the language of the lyrics of Sappho; nor the Doric, the language of war-songs or the chorus in the drama; nor the Ionic, the dialect of epic poetry; but the Attic Greek, and a corrupted form of that, a form corrupted by use in the streets and ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... a favorite member of the Chit-Chat Club for many years and wrote many brilliant essays, a volume of which was printed in 1893. The first two he gave were "Francis Petrarch" and "Burning Sappho." Among the most charming was "Ballads and Lyrics," which was illustrated by the equally charming singing of representative selections by Mrs. Ida Norton, the only time in its history when the club ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... instances it seems to me that the best things done by women equal the best things done by men in those lines. The best verses of Sappho, the best sonnets of Mrs. Browning, the best chapters of George Eliot, the best animal paintings of Rosa Bonheur, do not seem to me surpassed by their rivals in masculine work. If anything in verse of its sort is nobler than Mrs. Howe's "Battle ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... people to live in friendship together must have the same likings and aversions. Johnson thereupon calls to mind Sappho, who had shown that there could be love where there was ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... not willing you should go Into the earth, where Helen went; She is awake by now, I know. Where Cleopatra's anklets rust You will not lie with my consent; And Sappho is a roving dust; Cressid could love again; Dido, Rotted in state, is restless still: You leave me much ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... statues of some of the most beautiful women of antiquity, such as those of Julia Pia in the Vatican, and of the Capitoline Venus in the Museum of the Capitol, were made of this marble, obtained from the birthplace of Sappho. More beautiful is the kind known as the Marmor Tyrium, or the Greco-Turchinicchio, which has a light bluish tinge. It was shipped by the ancients at the port of Tyre from some unknown quarry ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... toiled were plowed by other hands. We saw the stream and banks where he and Mary sat together, the old stone church where the witches held their midnight revels, the two dogs, and the bridge of Ayr. With Burns, as with Sappho, it was love that awoke his heart to song. A bonny lass who worked with him in the harvest field inspired his first attempts at rhyme. Life, with Burns, was one long, hard struggle. With his natural love for the beautiful, the terrible depression of spirits ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... does any of it matter? It's all in the course of nature, and the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep. Middle age will be very nice and comfortable and entertaining, once one's fairly in it.... I go babbling about my wasted brain and fading looks as if I'd been a mixture of Sappho and Helen of Troy.... That's the worst of being a vain creature.... What will Rosalind do when her time comes? Oh, paint, of course, and dye—more thickly than she does now, I mean. She'll be a ghastly sight. A raddled harridan. At least I shall always look respectable, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... hard to say whether Chicago society is more deeply interested in the circus which is exhibiting on the lake-front this week, than in the compilation of Sappho's complete works just published in London, and but this week given to the trade in Chicago. As we understand it, Sappho and the circus had their beginning about the same time: if any thing, the origin of the circus antedated Sappho's birth some years, and ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... English heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in Spenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially integral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say that Sappho invented the Sapphic, or Alcaeus the Alcaic: each poet may have been a Vespucci to some precedent Columbus. But we are in a position to say that Spenser did most unquestionably invent the English Spenserian ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Lady Throckmorton. "Only innocent. But I can tell you all about Priscilla in a dozen words. Priscilla is a modern Sappho. Priscilla is an elderly young lady, who never was a girl—Priscilla is ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... At the other end of the room were two rickety card-tables and a stand of bookshelves where were displayed under dust four or five small volumes of M. Guy de Maupassant's stories, "Robinson Crusoe," "Sappho," "Mr. Barnes of New York," a work by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Bible, "The Arabian Nights' Entertainment," "Studies of the Human Form Divine," "The Little Minister," and a clutter of monthly magazines and illustrated weeklies of about that crispness one finds ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow; But where the glistening night dews weep O'er ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... and all the towns. Ascra laments thee far more than her Hesiod, and Pindar is less regretted by the forests of Boeotia. Nor so much did pleasant Lesbos mourn for Alcaeus, nor did the Teian town so greatly bewail her poet, while for thee more than for Archilochus doth Paros yearn, and not for Sappho, but still for thee doth Mytilene ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... foam of the upper sea; to-day the roses have brought into my little patch of garden the hues with which sun and sea proclaimed their everlasting marriage in the twilight of yester even. In the deep, passionate heart of these splendid flowers, fragrant since they bloomed in Sappho's hand centuries ago, this sublime wedlock is annually celebrated; earth and sky meet and commingle in this miracle of colour and sweetness, and when I carry this lovely flower into my study all the poets fall silent; here is a depth of life, a radiant outcome ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Pleiades and moon, Lo! of night it is the noon! See! the Hours their watch are keeping; Lovely lieth SAPPHO sleeping! ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... I was wrapping up 'Sappho' and ordering her a book with a title that sounded like a college yell, she told me she was getting on a higher plane, and I bowed her out. Say, Hen—now wouldn't that jar you?—the Ex getting ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of the ode are from the fictitious theology of Orpheus and Museus to the elegance and grace of Anacreon, Horace, and Sappho. It is mainly Horace whom Ogilvie has in view as the exemplar of the lyric poet, though "a professed imitator both of Anacreon and Pindar" (p. xxx). We can distinguish, therefore, several different criteria which contribute to Ogilvie's criticism: (1) a unity of sentiment consistent with a ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... name was Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, and she was an assistant to a milliner and dressmaker in Oxford Street. She was seventeen years old, five feet eight inches high, and weighed one hundred twenty pounds. Her hair was of a marvelous, coppery, low tone, and her features were those of Sappho. None of the assembled Brotherhood had ever seen Sappho, but they had their ideas about her. Whether the dressmaker's wonderful assistant had intellect and soul did not trouble the young man. Dante Gabriel, the Nestor of the group, twenty-two ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the cemetery, "Pasc[asi]o vitriario," shows that glassmaking was a Salonitan industry. Beneath the presbytery remains of an earlier building were discovered with a pagan mosaic of the second or third century, representing the poetess Sappho and the nine muses. The ambulatory is also floored with mosaic, in which is ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... attempt to adhere too closely to the text of the original and to reject paraphrase sometimes leads to results which can scarcely be described as other than the reverse of felicitous. An instance in point is Sappho's lines: ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... He kept it intact in its past. Uninhabited for nine years, the room had not the air of being resigned to its solitude. The mirror waited for the old lady's glance, and on the onyx clock a pensive Sappho was lonely because she did not hear the noise of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... fine success as a salesman lay in his geniality and the thoroughly reputable standing of his house. He bobbed about among men, a veritable bundle of enthusiasm—no power worthy the name of intellect, no thoughts worthy the adjective noble, no feelings long continued in one strain. A Madame Sappho would have called him a pig; a Shakespeare would have said "my merry child"; old, drinking Caryoe thought him a clever, successful businessman. In short, he was as ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... of France are not very handsome, they are sensible and witty. To many of them, without the least flattery, may be applied the distich which Sappho ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... where the donkeys were waiting for them. Margaret's was a fine, well-bred animal, called Sappho, with a skin as smooth as a white suede glove; it stood almost as high as a mule. Her saddle, too, was a new one, and well-fitting—Freddy had seen to that. The old Sheikh, who was turbanned and robed after the manner of Moses or Aaron, was presented to her. His pale grey camel was ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... a lyrist of the first order. Plato's poet says of him in the 'Symposium,' "When I hear the verses of Sappho or Anacreon, I set down my cup for very shame of my own performance." He composed in Greek somewhat, to use a very free comparison, as Herrick did in English, expressing the unrefined passion and excesses ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... ways. And won at Rome encouragement from man Only because they stayed at home and span; While PERICLES in Attic Greek expressed The view that those least talked about were best. There were exceptions, but the normal Greek Regarded SAPPHO as a dangerous freak, And CLYTEMNESTRA for three thousand years Was pelted with unmitigated sneers, Till RICHARD STRAUSS and HOFMANNSTHAL combined To prove that ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... looked like a splendid bas-relief in marble. It was in reality no bas-relief at all, but a wonderfully skilful bit of painting, so cleverly imitating the sculptor's chisel that even a closer inspection failed to detect the deception. It represented a recumbent Sappho playing on a nine-stringed lyre. The opening in the sounding-board of the instrument appeared to be a veritable hole over which real strings ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... wooing, sad and merry hours, Blisses tasted, kisses wasted, building Babel's towers! Hearts were aching, hearts were breaking, lashes wet with dew, When the ships touched the lips of islands Sappho knew; Yearning breasts and burning breasts, cold at last, are hid Amid the glooms of carven tombs in Khufu's pyramid— Though the sages, down the ages, smile their cynic doubt, Man and maid, unafraid, put ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... copious medley of subjects between the stiff Mandarins on the old fashioned china, and that Beaumont and Fletcher, the purchase of his rigid economy, ere his talents had brought him fame and fortune.—Letitia Landon "the English Sappho," a being existing but in the atmosphere of love and flowers; equally sensitive at the opening of a violet as at the shutting of a rose. But our list of the living is too extended; and we will speak of some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... much in the hands of poetical readers, he was tempted to try his own skill in giving Chaucer a more fashionable appearance, and put "January and May" and the "Prologue of the Wife of Bath" into modern English. He translated likewise the Epistle of "Sappho to Phaon" from Ovid, to complete the version, which was before imperfect, and wrote some other small pieces, which he afterwards printed. He sometimes imitated the English poets, and professed to have written at fourteen his poem upon ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... "beautiful." The prosecution declared that these poems were in essence a defence of the vilest immorality, but is it not possible for the most passionate poem, even the most vicious, to be "beautiful"? Nothing was ever written more passionate than one of the poems of Sappho. Yet a fragment has been selected out and preserved by the admiration of a hundred generations of men. The prosecution was in the position all the time of one who declared that a man who praised a nude picture must necessarily be immoral. Such a contention would be inconceivable in any other ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... The procession of ancients was brilliant and long, Aristotle and Plato were there, Thucydides, too, and Tacitus strong, And Plutarch, and Sappho ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... of antiquity In arms and hallowed arts as well have done, And of their worthy works the memory And lustre through this ample world has shone. Praised is Camilla, with Harpalice, For the fair course which they in battle run. Corinna and Sappho, famous for their lore, Shine two illustrious ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... raise his fellows nearer to the source of all Deity, as Socrates and Plato had raised men? Who could portray himself as Phidias had portrayed Athene? Could the Muses speak with their own voices as they had spoken by Sappho's? He was especially pleased to see his own moral superiority to Zeus so eloquently enforced by AEschylus, and delighted in criticising the sentiments which the other poets had put into the mouths of the gods. Homer, he thought, must have been in Olympus often, and Aristophanes ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... observe that "demonstration" is a strong term.—In his description of the Leucadian Promontory (of which we have a pleasing representation in the plate), the author remarks that it is "celebrated for the leap of Sappho, and the death of Artemisia." From this variety in the expression, a reader would hardly conceive that both the ladies perished in the same manner: in fact, the sentence is as proper as it would be to talk of the decapitation of Russell, and the death of Sidney. The view from this promontory ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... once from table; some of the company went on board ship, but most adjourned to the drawing-room, a comfortable apartment, furnished with blue satin damask, where we were joined by the French naval officers of His Most Christian Majesty's ship Sappho, and several ladies and gentlemen of the city. We had some excellent music. Madame do Rego has an admirable voice, and there were several good singers and players on the piano. It was a more pleasant, polished evening than I had expected to pass in Pernambuco, especially now in a state ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... There was nothing of the right sort in Paris, she declared; only five-storey hotels and suchlike; the notion of casting herself down from one of those artificial eminences did not appeal to her high-strung temperament; she craved to die like Sappho, her ideal. An architect was despatched, the ground purchased, the house built and furnished. That done, she settled up her affairs in France and established herself at Mon Repos. On the evening of her arrival she climbed the little height ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... frankly acknowledge the same practice? Mr. Hawkehurst wrote about anything and everything. His brain must needs be a gigantic storehouse of information, thought the respectful reader. He skipped from Pericles to Cromwell, from Cleopatra to Mary Stuart, from Sappho to Madame de Sable; and he wrote of these departed spirits with such a charming impertinence, with such a delicious affectation of intimacy, that one would have thought he had sat by Cleopatra as she melted her pearls, and stood amongst the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho—absorbing to intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that kept pouring from those ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a book, to find any equivalent for whose reality and completeness of passion, though it is passion for a woman whom the poet scarcely knows and of whom he desires nothing, we must go back to the merest fleshly love of Antiquity, of Sappho or Catullus; for modern times are too hesitating and weak. So at least it seems; but in fact, if we only think over the matter, we shall find that in no earthly love can we find this reality and completeness: it is possible ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... her loyalty to her husband. You would think by some of her poems that an East Indian regiment would not suffice for her, and yet she is the straightest wife on Manhattan Island. Oh, I know so many cases. You remember that girl who wrote, 'Love's Extremities,' a work as passionate as Sappho. She is a little Quaker-like maiden,[A] who dresses and talks like a sister of one of the Episcopal guilds. These women are on fire at the brain only. They would repel a physical advance with more indignation than those endowed with less esthetic ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... The great occasion should shed a glamour round her, together with him. "Emma's passion is admiration," Greville had written soon after they parted, "and it is capable of aspiring to any line which would be celebrated, and it would be indifferent, when on that key, whether she was Lucretia or Sappho, or Scaevola or Regulus; anything grand, masculine or feminine, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of War and Peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... high hall held of rare and strange: For on the king's right hand Leoena bowed In cloudlike marble, and beside her crouched The tongueless lioness; on the other side, And poising this, the second Sappho stood,— Young Erexcea, with her head discrowned, The anadema on the horn of her lyre: And by the walls there hung in sequence long Merlin himself, and Uterpendragon, With all their mighty deeds, down to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... allure of the belles of Sumatra, The fashion and finish of ladies from France. The youth of Susanna, beloved by an elder, The wit of a Chambers' incomparable minx, The conjugal views of the patient Griselda, The fire of Sappho, the calm of the Sphinx, The eyes of La Valliere, the voice of Cordelia, The musical gifts of the sainted Cecelia, Trilby and Carmen and Ruth and Ophelia, Madame de Stael and the matron Cornelia, Iseult, Hypatia and naughty Nell Gwynn, Una, Titania and Elinor ...
— Are Women People? • Alice Duer Miller
... has caught the contagion of patronage, and decoyed a poor fellow, named Blackett, into poetry; but he died during the operation, leaving one child and two volumes of 'Remains' utterly destitute. The girl, if she don't take a poetical twist, and come forth as a shoemaking Sappho, may do well, but the 'Tragedies' are as rickety as if they had been the offspring of an Earl or a Seatonian prize-poet. The patrons of this poor lad are certainly answerable for his end, and it ought to be an indictable offence. But this is the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... aside the book that you are reading from— What if Leander did swim the Hellespont? And what if burning Sappho Did sing? What do I care for Launcelot and Elaine, Or Tristram and Isolt, ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... as half his verses show him, Anacreon's morals are a still worse sample, Catullus scarcely has a decent poem, I don't think Sappho's Ode a good example, Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample: But Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... it that is left, the common residuum, to all these literary masters; to Homer, Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus, Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere; to Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in subject, and style, in ideas and ideals, in range of thought and knowledge? When ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the race of life. But I am not aware that Greek women improved much, either in manners, morals, or happiness, by acquiring them in after centuries. A wise man would sooner see his daughter a Nausicaa than a Sappho, an Aspasia, a Cleopatra, or even ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... is that high emotion, Muse more rapturous, you, than any Sappho. The Great Mother ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... Madame Emile de Girardin died. There was a flood of panegyrics and of tears. Monsieur Paulin Limayrac was chief pall-bearer, and demonstrated in the columns of "La Presse" that Madame Emile de Girardin had herself alone more genius than Sappho, Corinne, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, and Madame George Sand, all ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the river Hebrus. There it floated down stream and, strange to tell, the chords gave forth a lament, and the lifeless tongue uttered words. "Eurydice, Eurydice," it cried, till head and lyre were carried down to the sea, and on to Lesbos, the isle of sweet song, where in after years Alcaeus and Sappho tuned afresh the lyre ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... the languishing cooing of doves, the braying of donkeys, the chatter of irresponsible sparrows—these were in my mind's ear as I read. "Suffering Sappho!" I exclaimed to myself. "Is this the divine fire that is supposed to ignite genius and make ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... of Milo to be witty for us, or to solve us problems. Believe me, there is more thought, more eloquence, in the corners of a beautiful mouth—the upward look of two dark eyes—than in all women have said or done from Sappho down. Springy colour, light, music, perfume: they are all to be found in the curves of a perfect throat ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the natural love of women will end in friendship after the favour. For, Protogenes, the yielding of the female to the male was called by the ancients the favour. Thus Pindar says Hephaestus was the son of Hera 'without any favours':[69] and Sappho, addressing a girl not yet ripe for marriage, says to her, 'You seemed to me a little girl, too young for the favour.' And someone asks Hercules, 'Did you obtain the girl's favour by force or by persuasion?' ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... prohibitory laws, forbidding the sale of unguents, limiting the luxury of dress, and interfering with the sacred rights of mourners to passionately bewail the dead in the Asiatic manner; the same number being enriched with contributions from two rising poets,—a lyric of love by Sappho, and an ode sent by Anacreon from Teos, with an editorial note explaining that the Maces was not responsible for the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and perfected the native Roman growth, satire, from the ruder essays of Lucilius, so as to make Roman life from day to day, in city and country, live anew under his pen; on the other hand, he naturalized the metres and manner of the great Greek lyric poets, from Alcaeus and Sappho downward. Before Horace Latin lyric poetry is represented almost wholly by the brilliant but technically immature poems of Catullus; after him it ceases to exist. For what he made it he claims, in a studied modesty of phrase but with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... in his own way. Then, at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim had flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight or a month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a voice meant for the stage—a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon the English stage a hundred years before. Even in his cups, even after his darling ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... premeditated—stationed himself at an angle to the piano that allowed him a fair view of her, and did not grudge the merriest bachelor there his share of enjoyment, while he could keep furtive watch upon the changeful countenance, the Sappho-like head, and the delicate hands which one could have thought made the music, rather than did the obedient keys they touched. The wedded lovers had taste and pride in equal proportions, and a parade of their satisfaction in one another for the edification ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... of love considered as a disorder of mind and body, I recall a recent magazine article of Mr. Finck's, in which he analyzes Sappho's conception of love. "In that famous poem of Sappho," he says, "that has been so often declared a compendium of all the emotions that make up love, I have not been able to find anything but a comic catalogue of such feelings as might overwhelm ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... in the worst possible taste. The names cut beneath them gave the whole the air of a practical joke. A weeping statue was Democritus; another, with grinning mouth, was labelled Heraclitus; an old man with a long beard was Sappho; and an old ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... among the composers who have appeared during the last twenty-five years, M. Gounod was the most promising one, as showing the greatest combination of sterling science, beauty of idea, freshness of fancy, and individuality. Before a note of 'Sappho' was written, certain sacred Roman Catholic compositions and some exquisite settings of French verse had made it clear to some of the acutest judges and profoundest musicians living, that in him at last something true and ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in their first aspirations is yet true; and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis, none can,—certainly not she? Why not? She has a new and unattempted ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... become of this minstrel who sang the Minnelieder of the Car-barns? Like Homer, like Omar, like Sappho, like Shakespeare, he is a Voice singing out of the mists. He was but a Name to his employers; and his friends, if he has friends, remember him not. These Sonnets, written neatly on twenty-six violet transfer-slips, were discovered, together with a rejection blank from a leading ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... highest estimation by the Athenians, and was courted by kings and princes. Born in Thebes 522 B.C., he died probably in his eightieth year, being contemporary with Aeschylus and the battle of Marathon. We possess also fragments of Sappho, Simonides, Anacreon, and others, enough to show that could the lyrical poetry of Greece be recovered, we should probably possess the richest collection ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but with the voice of Sappho was ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... in a Woman! What an intellectual triumph was that of the lonely Aspasia, and how heartily acknowledged! She, indeed, met a Pericles. But what annalist, the rudest of men, the most plebeian of husbands, will spare from his page one of the few anecdotes of Roman women—Sappho! Eloisa! The names are of threadbare celebrity. Indeed, they were not more suitably met in their own time than the Countess Colonel Plater on her first joining the army. They had much to mourn, and their great impulses did not find due scope. But with time enough, space enough, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Over the whole earth, or go back in the past? While yet I mused, lo, up a garden walk, A lady chased a bird. An empty cage Stood in the vine-clad cottage-window near. The bird was like some sweet elusive thought; The maid, a Sappho, weary with pursuit. She only glanced my way to see me pass, Then turned and ran towards me, her large eyes With gladness scintillant. It was the maid, Veera. Her hand upon my shoulder, up the walk We went, my steed following, while her bird, Tired of his liberty, ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... Greece! the Isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung— Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all except their ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... a poem than many a tasteless version of a Psalm: if in the excitement of patriotism, why is Scots, wha hae superior to We don't want to fight? if in the mitigation of the passions, the Odes of Sappho will win but little praise: if in instruction, Armstrong's Art of preserving Health ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... talk of that subject.' JOHNSON, (with a loud voice.) 'Sir, I am not saying that you could live in friendship with a man from whom you differ as to some point: I am only saying that I could do it. You put me in mind of Sappho in Ovid[536].' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... us both of Sappho and of Homer in these strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day [Greek text]? Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some silent glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of all that in your songs reminds us ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... business to track her, and communicate her hiding-place to her family; and she shook with horror when she thought of the odious Israelitish bridegroom. 'The caverns of the deep green sea—the high Tarpeian rock—the Lencadian cliff of Sappho,'—she said, 'all would be preferable to that! And yet, O Thomas, to think that we should have met so suddenly, and that to part for ever!' 'Pon my soul, Fred, I am the most miserable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... might possibly have said that in comparison with thriving he starved. During this night he hummed airs in bed, thought he would do for the ballad of the fair poetess what other musicians had done for the ballads of other fair poetesses, and dreamed that she smiled on him as her prototype Sappho smiled on Phaon. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... between islands No. 87 and No. 88, and there Mr. P. got out his lines and commenced to fish, trolling his bait behind as the boat slowly sailed, under the hot sun, among those lovely isles, where, to be sure, burning's half o' the sport, but where "burning SAPPHO" would have lost herself utterly, and probably have tumbled into some of the watery intricacies and have ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... gray-clad, nunlike figure the passionate, sensuous Carmen of Bizet’s masterpiece? Could that calm, pale face, crossed by innumerable lines of suffering, as a spider’s web lies on a flower, blaze and pant with Sappho’s guilty love? ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... aliorum scriptis vertant vitio, all fools with them that cannot find fault; they correct others, and are hot in a cold cause, puzzle themselves to find out how many streets in Rome, houses, gates, towers, Homer's country, Aeneas's mother, Niobe's daughters, an Sappho publica fuerit? ovum [731]prius extiterit an gallina! &c. et alia quae dediscenda essent scire, si scires, as [732]Seneca holds. What clothes the senators did wear in Rome, what shoes, how they sat, where they went to the close-stool, how many dishes in a mess, what ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... girls can talk with fellows; And, full of indignation, frets, That women should be such coquettes: Iris, for scandal most notorious, Cries, "Lord, the world is so censorious!" And Rufa, with her combs of lead, Whispers that Sappho's hair is red: Aura, whose tongue you hear a mile hence, Talks half a day in praise of silence; And Sylvia, full of inward guilt, Calls Amoret an arrant jilt. Now voices over voices rise, While each to be the loudest vies: They contradict, affirm, dispute, No single tongue ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... in him only a monkey in love. He is even said to have thrown his little makeshift of a body, in its canvas bodice and its three pairs of stockings, at her feet, with the result that she burst out laughing. Pope took his revenge in the Epistle to Martha Blount, where, describing Lady Mary as Sappho, he declared of another lady that her different aspects agreed as ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Myrrha, my love, hast thou thy shell in order? Sing me a song of Sappho[18]; her, thou know'st, Who in thy ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... "Musis Amicus";[4] and not only the friend of poesy, he was a poet himself, and by virtue of the duality habitual to his mind dedicated his pen with singular impartiality to Christ and Apollo; one volume of verses being entitled 'Anacreon and Sappho,' another, containing a poem, on 'The Love of God.' These products rise somewhat above the level of respectable mediocrity, yet they have not escaped the stigma of platitudes. Goethe, however, did not disdain to make respectful ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... world,—languid when she pleases, indolent, coquettish, concerned about her toilet, pleased with the airy nothings so seductive to women and to poets. She understands very well that after Madame de Stael there is no place in this century for a Sappho, and that Ninon could not exist in Paris without grands seigneurs and a voluptuous court. She is the Ninon of the intellect; she adores Art and artists; she goes from the poet to the musician, from the sculptor to the prose-writer. Her heart is noble, endowed ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... St. Patrick the subject of his song. Four centuries before the great Spanish dramatist was born, a most elaborate and very lengthy poem was written on the same attractive theme by Marie de France, the first woman, as M. de Roquefort says,who ever wrote French verse, the Sappho of her age.* Nor was Marie herself the only minstrel of that early time who yielded to the fascination of this legend. Two anonymous Trouveres of a little later period were unconsciously her rivals in the attempt. M. l'Abbe de la Rue, in his valuable ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... as we cannot right it again, in order to take a second glance at the poet of Medea, we must pass on to the next. "Sophocles" will be acceptable to scholars. "Hesiod" is excellent. "Cared most for gods and bulls" is worth any money. "Pindar" and "Sappho" are but so so. The picture of "Theocritus" is very beautiful. There is nothing particularly felicitous in the sketch of "Aristophanes." How much more graphic is what Milton, in one of his prose works, says with respect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... the faces of the circle around us: some were as black and wild in their appearance as any American savages whatever. One woman was as comely almost as the figure of Sappho, as we see it painted. We asked the old woman, the mistress of the house where we had the milk, (which by the bye, Dr. Johnson told me, for I did not observe it myself, was built not of turf, but of stone,) what we should pay. She said, what we pleased. One of our guides asked ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... season of splendour, and, compared with the whole course of their duration, but a brief season. Since, then, English has had its great writers for a term of about three hundred years,—as long, that is, as the period from Sappho to Demosthenes, or from Pisistratus to Arcesilas, or from AEschylus and Pindar to Carneades, or from Ennius to Pliny,—we should have no right to be disappointed if the classical period be ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... apologise for entering so pompously into the minutiae of my bit of a story, as if it were the lost poems of Sappho; but it appears that the subject interests the public, and I comply with my instructions. I take it, then, that the origins of "The Bowmen" were composite. First of all, all ages and nations have cherished the thought that spiritual hosts may come to the help ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... to me to be jesting, like that scribe who told me of Krophi and Mophi; for Rhodopis lived in the days of King Amasis and of Sappho the minstrel, and was beloved by Charaxus, the brother of Sappho, wherefore Sappho reviled him in a song. How then could Rhodopis, who flourished more than a hundred years before my ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... just sat down for the twentieth time to a study of Katherine's head as "Sappho," and had thrown down his palette in ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... manners of the whole sex, and to me it appears clear, that they all spring from want of understanding. Whether this arises from a physical or accidental weakness of faculties, time alone can determine; for I shall not lay any great stress upon the example of a few women (Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs. Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame d'Eon, etc. These, and many more, may be reckoned exceptions; and, are not all heroes, as well as heroines, exceptions to general rules? I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes; but reasonable creatures.) who, from having received ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... love, jealousy, and despair, to every form of pathos, pleading and pity, to all the gentler and more feminine qualities. Desire in especial has inspired him with phrases more magically expressive even than those gasped out by panting Sappho when lust had made her body a lyre of deathless music. Her lyric to the beloved is not so ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... succeeded but too well. At the end of the great banquet Bartja, to whom Cambyses had promised to grant a favour on his victorious return from the war, confessed to him his love for Sappho, a charming and cultured Greek maiden of noble descent, whom he wished to make his wife. Cambyses was delighted at this proof of the injustice of his jealous suspicions, and announced aloud that Bartja would in a few days depart ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... is because of that instrument's idiosyncrasies of evanescent tone, sensitive touch and wide range in dynamics. It was Chopin's lyre, the "orchestra of his heart," from it he extorted music the most intimate since Sappho. Among lyric moderns Heine closely resembles the Pole. Both sang because they suffered, sang ineffable and ironic melodies; both will endure because of their brave sincerity, their surpassing art. The musical, the psychical ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Young Sappho, for want of employments, Alone o'er her Ovid may melt, Condemned but to read of enjoyments, Which wiser ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... we were all disappointed, for the lion lifted up his right paw, which was the fatal sign, and advancing forward, seized her by the arm, and began to tear it: The poor lady gave a terrible shriek, and cried out, 'The lion is just, I am no true virgin! Oh! Sappho, Sappho.' She could say no more, for the lion gave her the coup de grace, by a squeeze in the throat, and she expired at his feet. The keeper dragged away her body to feed the animal when the company was gone, for ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the greatest of the cities, mistress of the sea; and certainly some of the most famous among her citizens, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Hecataeus and Thales, belong approximately to this epoch, as do equally famous names from other Asiatic Greek communities, such as Alcaeus and Sappho of Lesbos, Mimnermus of Smyrna or Colophon, Anacreon of Teos, and many more. The fact is significant, because studies and literary activities like theirs could hardly have been pursued except in highly civilized, free and leisured societies ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... like a ridged lava-torrent in its first combustion. Then as the sun sank, the crags burned deeper with scarlet blushes as of blood, and with passionate bloom as of pomegranate or oleander flowers. Could Turner rise from the grave to paint a picture that should bear the name of 'Sappho's Leap,' he might strive to paint it thus: and the world would complain that he had dreamed the poetry of his picture. But who could dream anything so wild and yet so definite? Only the passion of orchestras, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Solenelle" in G,—the first of his compositions that was ever produced in England. It was cordially received, and he was universally recognized as a promising musician. For many years succeeding this event he devoted himself mainly to secular music, and opera after opera rapidly came from his pen,—"Sappho" (1851); "Nonne Sanglante" (1854); "Le Medecin malgre lui" (1858); "Faust," his greatest work, and one of the most successful of modern operas (1859); "Philemon et Baucis" (1860); "Reine de Saba" (1862); ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... suggested. It was very long, and very dull, and very wordy, and we could scarcely find a more deadly specimen of virtuous and didactic tragedy. Catharine was dreadfully disappointed, nor was she completely consoled by being styled—by no less a person than Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia—"The Sappho of Scotland." She determined, however, to appeal to readers against auditors, and when, two years later, after still further revision, she published The Revolution in Sweden, she dedicated it in most grateful ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... on the same premise. Then Mr. Tretherick began to drink, and Mrs. Tretherick to contribute regularly to the columns of the AVALANCHE. It was at this time that Colonel Starbottle discovered a similarity in Mrs. Tretherick's verse to the genius of Sappho, and pointed it out to the citizens of Fiddletown in a two-columned criticism, signed "A. S.," also published in the AVALANCHE, and supported by extensive quotation. As the AVALANCHE did not possess a font of Greek type, the editor was obliged to reproduce the Leucadian numbers in the ordinary ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Greek! Though "burning SAPPHO loved and sung," Why in Greek shackles should they seek To bind the British schoolboy's tongue? Eternal bores, that Attic set, But, heaven be thanked, we'll ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... understand me if I were to tell him, for instance, that the desire of beauty is in itself a morality." It was, perhaps, the only morality the Greeks knew, and upon the memory of Greece we have been living ever since. In becoming hetairae, Aspasia, Lais, Phryne, and Sappho became the distributors of that desire of beauty necessary in a state which had already begun to dream the temples of ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... death she took her place as mistress of the house which until 1620 had been the hospitable rendezvous of the literary society of Amsterdam. She was herself a woman of wide erudition, and her fame as a poet was such as to win for her, according to the fashion of the day, the title of "the Dutch Sappho." Tesselschade, ten years younger than her sister and educated under her fostering care, was however destined to eclipse her, alike by her personal charms and her varied accomplishments. If one could believe all that is said in her praise ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... up the lyre Born upon Thracian lands, as foster child; And on its golden strings the restless beatings Of Sappho's and Erinna's flaming hearts ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... the escritoire, he softly opened a side drawer, took out an oval-shaped engraving of his favourite Sappho, and compared the nose, chin, and ear with those of the unconscious girl. Satisfied with the result, he restored the picture to its hiding-place. Four years had materially changed the countenance he had seen last at the parsonage, but the almost angelic purity of expression which characterized ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Alypius. [75] The humanity of Alypius was tempered by severe justice and manly fortitude; and while he exercised his abilities in the civil administration of Britain, he imitated, in his poetical compositions, the harmony and softness of the odes of Sappho. This minister, to whom Julian communicated, without reserve, his most careless levities, and his most serious counsels, received an extraordinary commission to restore, in its pristine beauty, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... letters, and get the best letters written to them: but it is doubtful whether Greek women, save persons of a certain class and other exceptions in different ways like Sappho and Diotima,[5] ever wrote at all. The Romans, after their early period, were not merely a larger and ever larger community full of the most various business, and constantly extending their presence and their sway; ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... times with the fancy that Homer, Sappho, and Aristophanes are the inviolable Trinity of poetry, even to the extent of being reducible to One. For the fiery and lucid directness of Sappho, if her note of personal lyricism is abstracted, is seen to be an element ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... lately, these Many dainty mistresses: Stately Julia, prime of all: Sappho next, a principal: Smooth Anthea for a skin White, and heaven-like crystalline: Sweet Electra, and the choice Myrrha for the lute and voice: Next Corinna, for her wit, And the graceful use of it: With Perilla: all are gone; Only Herrick's ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Walter Raleigh's, the earliest on record, Dr. Parr's, Charles Lamb's, and the first calumet of peace which was ever smoked between a European and an Indian. Among other musical instruments, I noticed the lyre of Orpheus and those of Homer and Sappho, Dr. Franklin's famous whistle, the trumpet of Anthony Van Corlear, and the flute which Goldsmith played upon in his rambles through the French provinces. The staff of Peter the Hermit stood in a corner with that of good ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it looks back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great love-poetry since, while as something that is even greater than literature—life—it carries us up to the highest Heaven and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Sappho is no more, And no more Sapphos will be, in your time; The tree is dead on one side that before Ran with such burning sap of love and rhyme. Your glorious city is the utmost flower Of a one-sided culture, that will spend Itself upon ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the sistrum, sacred to the goddess Hathor. And weren't all the best gods goddesses, when you come to think of it? Women used to drive their own chariots, as we do our motors, and hold salons, like the French ladies. There was Rhodopis, for instance, who married the brother of Sappho. I wonder if Colonel Corkran could have told you that the story of Cinderella comes from an anecdote of Rhodopis? I hardly think that he's been able to spare enough time from bridge to study Strabo, who was the Baedeker of Egypt for tourists six hundred years ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... those charming commentaries of his on every variety of quaint topic; full of an amiable grace, tinged with the most delicate hue of a fine humor; a refined ore drawn from no ordinary mine without alloy; like the compositions of SAPPHO, to which an unerring critic has applied the expression, [Greek: chruseiotera chrusou]; the very best of gold. Doves never bore choicer billet-doux beneath their wings. A beautiful sentiment always touches the heart, though couched in homely phrase; but when one knows how to cull ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... languish In "Chastelard's" strain, And "Abelard's" anguish Is love's pleasant pain! And "Sappho" rehearses Love's blessings and curses In passionate verses Again ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... threw a purple shadow on the white pavement before his villa. A boy came forward from the garden; he had been walking amongst the vines and plucking the ripe grapes, and the juice had trickled down over his breast. Standing beside the girl, unashamed in the sunlight, he began to sing one of Sappho's love songs. His voice was as full and rich as a woman's, but purged of all emotion; he was an instrument of music in the flesh. Lucian looked at him steadily; the white perfect body shone against the roses and the blue of the sky, clear and gleaming ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... for him. Here had been the Phenicians with their brailed squaresail. Here had been the men of Rhodes, sailors and fighters both. Here the Greek penteconters with their sails and rigging of purple and black. Here the Cypriotes had sailed under the lee of the islands Byron loved and where Sappho sang her songs like wine and honey, sharp wine and golden honey. Here had the Roman galleys splashed and here the great Venetian boats set proud sail against the Genoese. Here had the Lion-heart sailed gallantly to Palestine. Here had Icarus fallen in the blue sea. Here ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... one. How many monarchs are forgotten while Aspasia is remembered! Who were the reigning kings during Sappho's time?" ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... Fett, cheerfully, addressing Billy. "You have taken the right classical way with her: think of Theseus and Ariadne, Phaon and Sappho. . . . We are back in the world's first best age; when a man, if he wanted a woman to wife, sailed in a ship and abducted her, as did the Tyrian sea-captain with Io daughter of Inachus, Jason with Medea, Paris with Helen of Greece; and again, when he tired of her, left her on ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the more spiteful your verses, the more certainly will future generations believe that Verus was the Phaon of Balbilla's Sappho, and that love scorned filled the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a light wind blowing From the immense blue circle of the sea, And the soft thunder where long waves whiten— These were the same for Sappho as ...
— Flame and Shadow • Sara Teasdale
... on poems of passion, And put my own pantings in rime, To celebrate, after a fashion, The damsels who took up my time. I fed upon Swinburne, believe me, I feasted on Byron and Burns, And couplets from Sappho would give ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... of the season has been Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh.' I could wish some things altered, I confess; but as it is, it is by far (a hundred times over) the finest poem ever written by a woman. We know little or nothing of Sappho,—nothing to induce comparison,—and all other wearers of petticoats must courtesy to ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... and deep, And in my Lesbos, over leagues of sea, The temples glimmer moonwise in the trees. Twilight has veiled the little flower face Here on my heart, but still the night is kind And leaves her warm sweet weight against my breast. Am I that Sappho who would run at dusk Along the surges creeping up the shore When tides came in to ease the hungry beach, And running, running, till the night was black, Would fall forespent upon the chilly sand And quiver with the winds from off the sea? Ah, quietly the shingle waits the tides Whose waves are ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... rare piece of good fortune the one manuscript of the Song-Story has escaped those waves of time, which have wrecked the bark of Menander, and left of Sappho but a few floating fragments. The very form of the tale is peculiar; we have nothing else from the twelfth or thirteenth century in the alternate prose and verse of the cante-fable. {1} We have fabliaux in verse, ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... flame, and that white town Where from the hearths, a fragrance of burnt wood, Blue-purple smoke creeps like a stain of wine Along the paved blue sea: yea, all this kindness Lies amid salt immeasurable flowing, The power of the sea, passion of love. I, Sappho, have made love the mastery Most sacred over man; but I have made it A safety of things gloriously known, To house his spirit from the darkness blowing Out of the vast unknown: from me he hath The wilful mind to make his fortune fair. Yea, here I stand for the whole earth ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie |
