"Sappho" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. 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 ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Comparative Condition of Woman in the Oriental, the Classic, the early Christian, and the Modern World. Relation of Mohammed and of Jesus to Women. Light thrown on the Condition of Women in Greece by the History of Sappho. Sentiment of Chivalry towards Woman. Woman ennobled by sharing in great public Interests. Decline of Letter-writing in our day. Duty of Women to cultivate Conversation. Duty of Women to cultivate the art of Manners. ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... When Sappho struck the quivering wire, The throbbing breast was all on fire; And when she raised the vocal lay, The captive ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... high in the ranks of literature. His play was applauded; his translations from Sappho had been published in the Spectator; he was an important and distinguished associate of clubs, witty and poetical; and nothing was wanting to his happiness but that he should be sure of its continuance. The work which had procured him the first notice from the public was his "Six ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... appeared were not in the classic forms. They are the languages of the streets 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 in ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... Catullus are superior to the others, and discover a lively imagination. Amongst the best of his productions, is a translation of the celebrated ode of Sappho: ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... decreed; 240 Women, who dance in postures so obscene, They might awaken shame in Aretine; Who when, retired from the day's piercing light, They celebrate the mysteries of Night, Might make the Muses, in a corner placed To view their monstrous lusts, them Sappho chaste; These, and a thousand follies rank as these, A thousand faults, ten thousand fools, who please Our pall'd and sickly taste, ten thousand knaves, Who serve our foes as spies, and us as slaves, 250 Who, by degrees, and unperceived, prepare Our necks for ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... isles of 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 ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... lies in the stimulation of religious feelings, Lead kindly Light is no better 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 should ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... on his hands, so he wrote her a cheque and, with a courtesy which must have made Sappho quite desperate, put her out of ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... His Sappho, a lyrical drama, is one of the few attempts that have been made to bring amongst us that tuneful trifle, the modern Opera of the Italians. It has been transferred by Mr. Mathias into that language, to which alone it seemed properly to belong. Mr. Glasse has done as much ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the 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 stanza—a form ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... clitoris (Zambur) Al-Siyuti (Kitab al-Iza' fi'Ilm al-Nikah) has a very interesting chapter on Sapphic venery, which is well known to Europe as proved by such works as "Gamiani," and "Anandria ou Confessions de Mademoiselle Sappho, avec la Clef," Lesbos, 1718. Onanism is fatally prevalent: in many Harems and girls' schools tallow candles and similar succedanea are vainly forbidden and bananas when detected are cut into four ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... words, which lulls the heart with unspeakable melancholy, and brings tears into the eyes and voice. Each succeeding verse takes up the story in the dull and distant tone of memory, weeping, regretting, yet resigned. If the Greek strophes of Sappho are the very fire of love, these Scotch notes are the very life's blood and tears of a heart stricken to death by Fate. I know not who wrote the music, but whoever he may be, thanks be to him for having found in a few notes, and in the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically. Hence the male feminisme whereby the man becomes patiens as well as agens, and the woman a tribade, a votary of mascula Sappho,[FN364] Queen of Frictrices or Rubbers.[FN365] Prof. Mantegazza claims to have discovered the cause of this pathological love, this perversion of the erotic sense, one of the marvellous list of amorous vagaries which deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... sacrifice. They float with the moon-ark of Astarte Mylitta on hyacinthine seas of night-clouds, and their high import, dimmed and lost in the great stream of Time, rises again in the ages, uncrowned with the early luxuriance of symbol and mystery. The mystic horns appear over the brow of the queenly Sappho of Grillparzer, upon ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... I heard the harp of Pindar, and the impassioned song of the dark-eyed Sappho. I thought I heard the lofty epic of the blind Homer, rushing on in the red tide of battle, and the divine Plato discoursing like an oracle in his ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of death. She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho into the unknown. The knowledge of the imminence of death was like a drug. Darkly, without thinking at all, she knew that she was near to death. She had travelled all her life along the line of fulfilment, and ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the baby, or to take care of any of the animals while their various owners were away. It would have been impossible to him to have forgotten to feed the dormouse for a week as Nancy did, or to have left Sappho the canary without any water, which Pennie to her great agony of mind was ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... of all ages it is, From Teos, and Lesbos, and Ind; Through the years, like a shuttle of gold, Runs the wonder of song on the wind— The wonder of flute and of lyre, A music made mellow and meet For Sappho, the princess of song. Oh, the South ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... to Hades," an ancient proverb Tells us, "and one of them thou thyself shalt follow, Doubt not!" My sweetest Sappho, who can doubt it? Tells not each day the old tale? Yet the foreboding word in a youthful bosom Rankles not, as a fisher bred by the seashore, Deafened by use, perceives the breaker's thunder no more. —Strangely, however, today my heart misgave me. Attend: Sunny ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... of the Romans was the Aphrodite Dolie of the Greeks.{3} Beauty cannot co-exist with baldness; but it may and does co-exist with deceit. Homer makes deceitful allurement an essential element in the girdle of Venus.{4} Sappho addresses her as craft-weaving Venus.{5} Why should I multiply examples, when poetry so abounds with complaints of deceitful love that I will be bound every one of this company could, without a moment's hesitation, find a quotation in point?—Miss ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... The hetera were their companions, their inspiration and their teachers. Aspasia, one of the greatest women of antiquity, was such an emancipated individuality. True to the urge of the feminine spirit, she, like Sappho, the poetess of Lesbia, sought to arouse the Greek wives to the expression of their individual selves. One writer says of her efforts: "This woman determined to do her utmost to elevate her sex. The one method of culture open ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... women 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 light, to ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... 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 ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... drama was an Italian opera translated into English, and set to new music by Thomas Clayton, formerly band master to William III. No. 20 of the Spectator and other numbers from time to time advertised 'The Passion of Sappho, and Feast of Alexander: Set to Musick by Mr. Thomas Clayton, as it is performed at his house in 'York Buildings.' It was the same Clayton who set to music Addison's unsuccessful opera of 'Rosamond', written as an experiment ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... ensure this a race of vigorous mothers was essential. They had the wisdom to understand that their women could only effectively discharge the functions assigned to them by Nature by the free development of their bodies, and full cultivation of their mental faculties. Sappho, whose "lofty and subtle genius" places her as the one woman for whose achievement in poetry no apology on the grounds of her sex ever needs to be made, was of AEolian race. The Spartan woman was a huntress and an athlete and also a scholar, for her training ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... taught posterity what sort of thing an ode should be. His grand pre-eminence as an artist was due, in great measure, to his personality. Frigid, austere, and splendid; not genial like that of Simonides, not passionate like that of Sappho, not acrid like that of Archil'ochus; hard as adamant, rigid in moral firmness, glittering with the strong, keen light of snow; haughty, aristocratic, magnificent—the unique personality of the man ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... 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 ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... in this place it is a topic which the prudent carefully avoid among ladies. To tell the truth, they have had to listen to far too much poetry, and too many discussions on the caesura. There are, indeed, a few lady poets—very few. Sappho, for example; indeed I cannot recall any other at this moment. The result is that Phaon, of all the shadows here, is the most distinguished by the fair. He was not a poet, you know; he got in on account of Sappho, who ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... 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 long-buried amphora of inspiration. What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... And has my little Margy-wargles forgotten what Sappho said of an old maid? We'd have lost it if some old scholiast on the stupid old sophist Hermogenes hadn't happened to quote it to explain the word glukumalon—an apple grafted on a quince. Sappho said this old maid was ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... smiling France, and beautiful Italy with its wealth of sunlight, and its treasures of art. I have seen classic Greece,—of which we have talked so many hours,—and its fairy islands nestling in the blue Archipelago,—isles where Sappho sang. I have been among the Alps, and have seen the sunset touch with its last gleam, the eternal waste of snow; but more than all, I love dear Germany, the land of music and flowers, scholarship ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... 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 Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... considerable gain in the way of temperance, nor does he allow of those enthusiastic friendships between older and younger persons which in his earlier writings appear to be alluded to with a certain degree of amusement and without reproof (compare Introduction to the Symposium). Sappho and Anacreon are celebrated by him in the Charmides and the Phaedrus; but they would have been expelled from the ...
— Laws • Plato
... 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 parish-lions never ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... 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 ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... place, 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his age, and had a face like that picture of a lady over Sappho Smith's letters in the ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Mademoiselle Scudery, the Sappho of the French, made along with her no less celebrated brother, a curious incident befell them at an inn at a great distance from Paris. Their conversation happened one evening to turn upon a romance which they were ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... 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 which he saw, just as the Devonshire parson preserved ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Professor Richter, the learned editor of the fragments of Sappho, did not equal Tzschirner in keenness of intellect and bewitching powers of description, yet we gladly ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 sun ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... accomplishment,—that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor the Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the three hundred and sixty-five wives of Mohammed; but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon could read altogether too well; while the case of Saint Brigitta, who brought forth twelve children and twelve books, was clearly exceptional, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... lyric muse, thou didst not tune alone The lyre that loving Orpheus smote With subtle touch, who struck the golden note That pierced dread Pluto's heart of stone, And won again Eurydice his own; Nor yet Erate's lute, nor Sappho's throat That thrilled the ear in Grecian isles remote, Where Homer sang, and Art had built her throne: But thou, Euterpe, touched blind Milton's tongue, And swept the thousand chords of Shakespeare's soul; Woke Byron from his hours of idle dream, And then he sang mankind ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... and, whatever its moral value may be, monogamy does violence to the law of his being. It is a barrier against which he ever beats like some wild beast of prey against restraining bars. Give him Psyche to wife and Sappho for mistress and he were not content—would swim a river to make mad love to some freckled maid. It is likely that Leander had at home a wife he dearly loved when he lost his life trying to reach fair Hero's bower. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... now—the sweetest, gentle soul he was, with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in stature, with a Roman nose, continually making the effort to keep his neck straight, and draw his paunch in. He used to say that the universe was being frantically contended for by two Powers: a White ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... spread about women is that they're too fond of pleasure to settle down. How often one hears statements such as 'Juno Jones wouldn't make a good wife, she's out all day playing golf;' or 'I couldn't afford to marry Sappho Smith, she's too fond of dress and theatre-going.' God bless the man! What else have the poor girls to do? Sappho has a taste for dainty clothes and a love for the theatre; she fills her empty existence with these things as far as she can; Juno has nothing ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... 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 ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... sayest thou—and I marvel, I repeat, To find thee trip on such a mere word—"what Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: Sappho survives, because we sing her songs, And Aeschylus, because we read his plays!" 305 Why, if they live still, let them come and take Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup, Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive? Say rather that my fate is deadlier ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... to the time when it passed into drama on the Athenian stage. The names of the poets are universally known, and have become, indeed, almost part of our poetic language. Every one speaks of an Anacreon, a Sappho, and a Pindar; and the names of Archilochus, Alcman, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Simonides, Ibycus, and Bacchylides, if not so often used, are yet familiar to most. Few of these lyrists belonged to Greece proper. They belonged to Greece ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to sing. Of the various theatrical performances we organised in those early days, often after elaborate preparation, with the view of amusing ourselves on the birthdays of our elders, I can hardly remember one, save a parody on the romantic play of Sappho, by Grillparzer, in which I took part as one of the singers in the crowd that preceded Phaon's triumphal car. I endeavoured to revive these memories by means of a fine puppet show, which I found among the effects of my late stepfather, and for which he himself had painted some beautiful scenery. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... and passing through several splendid apartments, at length reached a large and magnificent saloon. It was hung with tapestry, upon which were represented the figures of Sappho sweeping the lyre; of the Spartan mother bending over the body, and counting the wounds of her son; of Penelope in the midst of her maidens, carefully unravelling the funeral web of her husband; of Lucretia inflicting ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... as we have set aside the comparison of Karschin with Sappho and of Willamov with Pindar; but no such development took place in Rome. Owing to the interest of the subject especially for aristocratic circles, and the great plastic talent of the poet, the Annals remained the oldest Roman original poem which appeared ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... a rake, 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[41] 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... beaches with 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 ...
— Flame and Shadow • Sara Teasdale
... Sappho, Greek poetess of the sixth century B.C., called "The Tenth Muse." Fragments of her verse remain which are very beautiful. She was the victim of unrequited love, and leaped to her death from the Leucadian ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... it would show them how to achieve their freedom, and might even encourage them to assume leadership. Here and there, individual women gained the training necessary for leadership, as in the cases of Sappho, Aspasia or Hypatia; but the great mass of women was sternly repressed. Eve leads a long line of women martyrs who, across the ages, have paid a great price for their desire to eat of the tree of knowledge. For herself, she might have paid the price but, with subtle understanding of ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... 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 was not accorded the paternity of his own pictures. To Terburg, Pieter ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... proud and unrelenting 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Bath Easton, now Pindus. They caught a little of what was then called taste, built, and planted, and begot children, till the whole caravan were forced to go abroad to retrieve. Alas! Mrs. Miller is returned a beauty, a genius, a Sappho, a tenth muse, as romantic as Mademoiselle Scuderi, and as sophisticated as Mrs. Vesey. The captain's fingers are loaded with cameos, his tongue runs over with virt'u; and that both may contribute to the improvement of their own country, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... answered 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 my ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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 good as his ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... flourished, especially from 670 to 440 B.C. The Aeolian lyrists of Lesbos founded a school of their own. The two great representatives are Alcaus, who sang of war and of love, and Sappho, who sang of love. "Probably no poet ever surpassed Sappho as an interpreter of passion in exquisitely subtle harmonies of form and sound." Anacreon, an Ionian, resembled in his style the Aeolian lyrists. He was most often referred to by the ancients as the poet of sensuous ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the tuneful strain, An early, rich, and inexhausted vein. But if thy pre-existing soul Was form'd at first with myriads more, It did through all the mighty poets roll Who Greek or Latin laurels wore, And was that Sappho last, which once it was before. If so, then cease thy flight, O heaven-born mind! Thou hast no dross to purge from thy rich ore: Nor can thy soul a fairer mansion find, Than was the beauteous frame she left behind: Return, to fill or mend the quire of thy ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... 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 a just sense ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... when choral and patriotic song began to be developed. In connection with this part of the history, there was in the later portion of it a more ornamental and fanciful development of the smaller and social uses of song, represented by Sappho, Anacreon and others. This period endured for about two centuries and a half, and by insensible degrees passed into the Attic drama, which came to its maturity at the hands of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides about ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... at the Cape, he observed the minor planets Iris, Victoria, and Sappho, and secured the co-operation of four other heliometers. His final result was 92,870,000 miles, the parallax being ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... at the psychological moment, pursue him from rock to rock, capture him at the last, and thus bring about the triumph of justice. But the dog's manager was not thus to be put down. He went with a petition to Frulein Jagemann (whose portrait in the character of Sappho my readers may still find hanging on a wall of the library at Weimar), and solicited her intervention with the Grand Duke, whose reign Schiller and Goethe made glorious. Frulein Jagemann was a prima donna and the Grand Duke's mistress. ("The companion of my leisure moments," ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... patriotic than Joan of Arc? Who was braver? Who has given us a grander instance of self-sacrificing devotion? Ah! you remember, you remember well, what a throb of pain, what a great tidal wave of grief swept over us all when Joan of Arc fell at Waterloo. Who does not sorrow for the loss of Sappho, the sweet singer of Israel? Who among us does not miss the gentle ministrations, the softening influences, the humble piety of Lucretia Borgia? Who can join in the heartless libel that says woman is extravagant in dress when he can look back and call to mind our simple and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Compulsory 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
... 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 put ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... 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 ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... 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 ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... to be a kind of painting: It is not the picture of the poet, but of things, and persons imagined by him. He may be in his practice and disposition a philosopher, and yet sometimes speak with the softness of an amorous Sappho. I would not be misunderstood, as if I affected so much gravity as to be ashamed to be thought really in love. On the contrary, I cannot have a good opinion of any man who is not at least capable of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... though in manner or subject promising a classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.—No! after all, it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:— ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... are not very handsome, they are sensible and witty. To many of them, without the least flattery, may be applied the distich which Sappho ascribes to herself: ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... hope, 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
... independent. This little wooden writer became the fashion chiefly through Madame de Girardin. Its communications soothed her last days, and prepared her for a death fragrant with hope. She believed she was in communication with the spirits of Sappho, Shakespeare, Madame de Sevigne, and Moliere; and amidst these convictions she died, without disquietude, without rebellion, without regret. She had introduced a taste for such experiments into the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... 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.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... came to a stand, to look about her, when her dog, to whom Dymock had given the poetical name of Sappho, began to prick up her ears, and snuff as if she scented something more than ordinary, and the next minute, she dashed forward, made her way through certain bushes, and disappeared. Tamar called aloud; a hollow echo re-sounded her ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... quivered in slight but gelatinous fashion. Her eyes—they were the color of perfect June at that high-noon moment when the spinning of the humming-bird can be distilled to sound. Laura and Marguerite and Stella Schump had eyes as blue as Cleopatra's, and Sappho's and Medea's must have ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... Again, there is a whole-length showing her about to descend some steps to a lawn, her superb shoulders and neck bare, and her hair highly bedecked with feathers. Walpole writes of another portrait, drawn by Lady Di Beauclerck, and engraved by Bartolozzi: "A Castilian nymph conceived by Sappho and executed by Myron, would not have had more grace and simplicity. The likeness is perfectly preserved, except that the paintress has lent her own expression to the Duchess, which you will allow ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... retreat Of Parthia; Parthia dreads the thrall Of Rome; but Death with noiseless feet Has stolen and will steal on all. How near dark Pluto's court I stood, And AEacus' judicial throne, The blest seclusion of the good, And Sappho, with sweet lyric moan Bewailing her ungentle sex, And thee, Alcaeus, louder far Chanting thy tale of woful wrecks, Of woful exile, woful war! In sacred awe the silent dead Attend on each: but when the song Of combat tells and tyrants fled, Keen ears, press'd shoulders, closer throng. What marvel, ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... Simple Simon, Jill, and Jack who had had his head mended, and the cat that fell into the cream—all these danced in a giddy reel, while Plato solemnly discoursed on the laws of Topsyturvy Land. Then followed grim-visaged Calvin and "violet-crowned, sweet-smiling Sappho" who danced a Schottische. Aristophanes and Moliere joined for a measure, both talking at once, Moliere in Greek and Aristophanes in German. I thought this odd, because it occurred to me that German was a dead language before Aristophanes was born. Bright-eyed Shelley brought in a fluttering ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... glow, shining 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, the fire-flight of the last movement ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... 'Sheridan,' that Lord Tennyson's ballad of The Revenge and his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington are worthy of a place beside Thomson's Rule Britannia, that Edgar Allan Poe, Disraeli and Mr. Alfred Austin are artists of note whom we may affiliate on Byron, and that if Sappho and Milton 'had not high genius, they would be justly reproached as sensational'? And surely it is a crude judgment that classes Baudelaire, of all poets, with Marini and mediaeval troubadours, and a crude style that writes of 'Goethe, Shelley, Scott, and Wilson,' for a mortal should not thus intrude ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... not for the dead alone Whose song has told their hearts' sad story,— Weep for the voiceless, who have known The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the Sappho from the Prytaneum, the work of Silanion! a thing of such beauty that no other man can have the like of it in his own private house; yet Verres has it—a man hardly fit to carry such a work of art as a burden, not possess it as a treasure of his own. ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... classics that there were certain females inhabiting the borders of the Aegean Sea who had a sentimental attachment for one another which was called "Lesbian love," and which carried them to the highest degree of frenzy. The immortal effusions of Sappho contain references to this passion. The solution of this peculiar ardor is found in the fact that some of the females had enlarged clitorides, strong voices, robust figures, and imitated men. Their manner was imperative and authoritative to their sex, who worshiped ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of humanity; and are to be given to every human being, that he may start fair in 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 ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Pernambuco, &c.—When we all rose at 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 ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... quite forget to sound The chord whose music is undying, if She do not strike it when Sam Patch is drowned. Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff The Lesbian Sappho leapt from in a miff, To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead Because the wax did not continue stiff; And, had he minded what his father said, He had not given a name ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... common to be noted. Cleopatra were lost among the horde of forgotten sovereigns, had she wedded duly and scorned Mark Antony; Aspasia would have been buried in a gynaeconitis had she wedded Pericles, and Sappho—but the list is too long; I will not bury you ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... and found they were only half omnipotent. The justice was retributive, but it was very complete. Be sure, with those passionate natures, the honey of a thousand triumphs never deadened the sting of the one discomfiture. Suitors flocking from every shore and island of the AEgean never made Sappho forget, for one hour, that stubborn impassible Phaon. No wonder such are cruel and unjust to their subjects in after days. Poor innocent AEgeus very often has to do penance for ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... "Lucia." I stood on the threshold of the drawing-room and waited till she had done. I believed her to be unaware of my presence. She was what we poets call a "dream of loveliness," a tangible dream. Her neck and shoulders were like satin, and the head above them reminded me of Sappho's which we see in marble. From where I stood I could catch a glimpse of the profile, the nose and firm chin, the exquisite mouth, to kiss which I would gladly have given up any number of fortunes. The cheek had that delicate curve of a rose leaf, and when the warm blood surged into it there ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... of Tubal, loud and strong, Sweet as the songs of Sappho, aye more sweet; Long as the spear of Arnon, twice as long, What time he hurled ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... daylight shall lift up thy paean, Hill to hill thunder, vale cry back to vale, With wind-notes as of eagles AEschylean, And Sappho singing in ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... any woman who has ever touched lyre or blown through reed since the days of the great AEolian poetess. But Sappho, who, to the antique world was a pillar of flame, is to us but a pillar of shadow. Of her poems, burnt with other most precious work by Byzantine Emperor and by Roman Pope, only a few fragments remain. Possibly they lie mouldering in the scented darkness of an Egyptian ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... been repeatedly reprinted, with her notes. She published French translations of the "Amphitryon," "Rudens," and "Lepidicus," of Plautus, with a good preface, of the comedies of Terence, of the "Plutus," and "The Clouds," of Aristophanes, and of Anacreon and Sappho. She also translated the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," with a preface and notes. This led to a controversy between her and La Motte, who had spoken slightingly of Homer. Madame Dacier wrote, in 1714, "Considerations sur les Causes de la Corruption du Gout," in which she defended ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... brilliance, Mlle. de Lespinasse (1732?-76) might cherish a calm friendship for D'Alembert. When M. de Guibert came to succeed M. de Mora in her affections, she poured out the lava torrent of passion in those Letters which have given her a place beside Sappho and beside Eloisa. Madame Roland in her girlhood had been the ardent pupil of Rousseau, whose Nouvelle Heloise was to her as a revelation from heaven. The first appearance in literature of Madame Necker's amazing daughter was as the eulogist ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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
... this 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
... thought, here at Patirion, in the sight of that old Hellenic colony, and with the light chatter of those women still ringing in my ears. Its writer, with whom not all of us will agree, declared that first in importance of all the antiquities buried in Italian soil come the lost poems of Sappho. The lost poems of Sappho—a singular choice! In corroboration whereof he quoted the extravagant praise of J. A. Symonds upon that amiable and ambiguous young person. And he might have added Algernon ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... 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 ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Pliny even quotes Sappho, who loved and sung, and whose poems reached us only through scattered quotations, as if Emerson's works should perish and we would revive him through a file of "The Philistine" magazine. Pliny and Paul were contemporaries. Pliny lived at Rome when ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... of comfortable places, had collected about the Surintendant talent, fashion, and beauty. Some of the ablest men in the kingdom were in his employ. Pellisson, famous for ugliness and for wit, the Acanthe of the Hotel de Rambouillet, the beloved of Sappho Scudery, was his chief clerk. Pellisson was then a Protestant; but Fouquet's disgrace, and four years in the Bastille, led him to reexamine the grounds of his religious faith. He became, luckily, enlightened on the subject of his heresies at a time when the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... and although we possess no authentic examples of it, we know what its scales consisted of and what instruments were in use. It would be interesting to pass in review the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the odes of Sappho and Pindar, those of the latter having a novel periodicity of form which gives force to the suggestion that these choric dances were the forerunners of our ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... 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 close ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... their carriage), "and were troubled at the very sight of him; many came near him, many followed him wheresoever he went," as those [4876]formarum spectatores did Acontius, if at any time he walked abroad: the Athenian lasses stared on Alcibiades; Sappho and the Mitilenean women on Phaon the fair. Such lovely sights do not only please, entice, but ravish and amaze. Cleonimus, a delicate and tender youth, present at a feast which Androcles his uncle made in Piraeo at Athens, when he sacrificed to Mercury, so stupefied the guests, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... say so, is very different from anything Hebrew, or, for the matter of that, Greek or Roman; their ardour is not a transient phenomenon which disturbs them, like that of the Shulamite, or the lover described by Sappho or Plato, but a chief business of their life, as in the case of Dante, of Petrarch, of Francesca and Paolo, or Tristram and Yseult. Indeed, it is difficult to guess whether this self-satisfied, self-glorifying quality, which distinguishes mediaeval passion ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... my fair one happy day, What I should call her in my lay; By what sweet name from Rome or Greece; Lalage, Nesera, Chloris, Sappho, Lesbia, or Doris, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... 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 ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray |
