"Sappho" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... To explain myself on this point, I will ask the reader to recall any one of Mr. Alma Tadema's pictures; it matters not a jot which is chosen. That one, for instance, where, in a circular recess of white marble, Sappho reads to a Greek poet, or is it the young man who is reading to Sappho and her maidens? The interest of the picture is purely archaeological. According to the very latest researches, the ornament which Greek women wore in their hair was of such a shape, and Mr. Tadema has reproduced the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Cowley calls it) just warm from the brain. It came to me the first moment I waked this morning. Yet, you will see, it was not so absolutely inspiration, but that I had in my head not only the verses of Adrian, but the fine fragment of Sappho, &c.' ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... cunning scheme 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... great Dorian lyrists, 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
... MITYLENE, a Greek lyric poet, an aristocrat by birth, a contemporary and an alleged lover of Sappho, and much admired by ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... first copy of nonsense verses, All in the antique style of Mistress Sappho, Latin just like Horace the tuneful ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... burning summers. Elsie Venner is not sensual, and sensuality is the leading trait of the human-serpent nature. Herein lies an error, just as a sculptor would err who should present Lady Godiva as fully draped, or Sappho merely as a sweet singer of Lesbos, or Antinous only as a fine young man. He who would harrow hell and rake out the devil, and then exhibit to us an ordinary sinner, or an opera bouffe "Mefistofele," as the result, reminds one of the seven Suabians who went to hunt a monster,—"a Ungeheuer,"—and ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... resist such an opportunity. She gulped down the Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with difficulty from asking when Sappho lived, and what else she wrote worth reading, and contriving to come in punctually at the end with "the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... entered the mansion, 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 upon herself a glorious and voluntary death; and of Arria teaching ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... 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 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
... best things steal upon the world! And in a world where a single line of Sappho's survives as a something more important than the entire political history of Lesbos, how little will the daily newspaper help us ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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, and prose Arthurian romances. We have Chansons de Geste, heroic ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... pretends that the Greeks had a bald Venus. The Venus Calva 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, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... difficult to translate, but Sappho and Cleopatra expressed it in their lives; perhaps ardent in love would be ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... promising himself, no doubt, a comfortable jog-trot existence in the ordinary groove, to discover in after years that he was mated with the most remarkable woman that had made herself heard of in the literary world since Sappho! But he remained fatally blind to the nature of the development that was taking place under his eyes, preserving to the last the serenest contempt for his wife's intelligence. Her large mind and enthusiastic temperament ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... quire" (Chaucer), "Night-music's king" (Richard Barnfield, 1549), "Angel of the spring" (Ben Jonson), "Music's best seed-plot" (Crashaw), "Best poet of the grove" (Thomson), "Sweet poet of the woods" (Mrs. Charlotte Smith), "Dryad of the trees" (Keats), "Sappho of the dell" (Hood); but the foregoing list of simple adjectives (which doubtless could be greatly increased by a more extended poetical reading) sufficiently demonstrates the popularity of the nightingale as a poetical embellishment, and would, perhaps, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various
... were merely a few hurriedly written lines with various blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did not prevent the enamored youth from preserving them with more solicitude than if they had been the autographs of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia. ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... 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 time, be ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... propensity, much more likely is it that 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
... addressed me in indulgent words as these, who knows but that, like burning Sappho, I might have sang as well as loved? Who knows but that the golden gates of the Eden of immortality might have opened to admit the wandering Peri to her long-lost home? I might have been the priestess of a shrine of Delphic celebrity, and the world have offered ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... poetry of nature compare the faultless English and elegant sweetness of the Idylls of the King with the vigorous and expressive, but often ungrammatical, prose of Mallory, or compare Virgil with Homer, Horace with Sappho, a chorale by Mendelssohn with a chorale by Bach. Or compare a modern refrain dragged in for no other reason than because the poet has felt that the form requires a refrain of some kind and has tried to find one that is suitable—compare such a refrain ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... took 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, all ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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
... and exquisite intonings of feeling, furnish us with important information. They are the facts of the sex life, as much as the song of the nightingale, or the mocking laughter of the cuckoo pursued by its mate. So Sappho and Elizabeth Browning, to take only two samples, have contributed some of the feminine reaction. The erotic motive in literature has but paralleled the erotic motive in life, with all of its vagaries, delusions, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... gazed 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 long ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... given it the name by which it is chiefly known—the Sappho comet, or bar-tailed humming-bird. It is a migratory bird, seldom, however, found so far north. It is a native of Bolivia, where it is found in gardens, and near the abodes of men, of whom it seems to have no fear. In the winter it flies off to the warm ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 and wise, was not to be swept off his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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 ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 parish-lions never used to eat in public. After a little pause, another ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... love,—why is it that in you it pleases me, fascinates me? Oh, how I love you!' he continued. 'All your faults, your frights, your petty foibles, add an indescribable charm to your character. I feel that I should detest a Sappho, a strong, courageous woman, overflowing with energy and passion. O sweet and fragile creature! how couldst thou be otherwise? That angel's voice, that refined voice, would have been an anachronism coming from any other breast ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... topic that was started, harmless though it seemed at first, was fraught with yet graver peril. The world of scholarship was at that time agitated by the recent discovery of what might or might not prove to be a fragment of Sappho. Browning proclaimed his unshakeable belief in the authenticity of these verses. To my surprise, Ibsen, whom I had been unprepared to regard as a classical scholar, said positively that they had not been written by Sappho. Browning challenged him to ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... much in translation, and it may be asserted with some reason that they lose their most essential qualities. It may well be doubted, therefore, whether any one can derive great pleasure or benefit from the study of the poems of Sappho or the odes of Horace, for example, unless these are studied in the original. The value of other literary productions, on the other hand, lies partly in their form and partly in their content, or in their content ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... worshippers of the world. He looked at the sun and its worshippers—those who sought the origin of purity by worshipping that which is the origin of all good. He looked at the fables of Greece, and found delight in the thought of Sappho uttering her diapason of joy in lyrics which told of love and beauty; at Egypt, where the priests, in their esoteric cunning, searched in vain for that which gives life, and motion, and joy; and then he glanced at the Christian heaven, but here all was dark—dark as the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... 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
... chains and an Italian prison; but the unexpected assault of death has carried off, and will carry off, the world in general. How near was I seeing the dominions of black Proserpine, and Aeacus sitting in judgment; the separate abodes also of the pious, and Sappho complaining in her Aeohan lyre of her own country damsels; and thee, O Alcaeus, sounding in fuller strains on thy golden harp the distresses of exile, and the distresses of war. The ghosts admire them both, while they utter strains worthy of ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow; But where the glistening night dews weep ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... than the obvious inequality in the extend and greatness of the labors to which an equal reward of fame has been allotted. The abounding energy and picturesque variety of Homer are illustrated in eight-and-forty books: the remains of Sappho might be written on the surface of a leaf of the laurus nobilis. Yet if the one expands before us with the magnificent extent, the diversified surface, the endless decorations of the earth itself, the other hangs on high, like a lone, clear ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... 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. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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 pass in Pernambuco, ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... breathe; they are so real that they seem things rather than words, or, nearer still, living beings. They have taken all hearts, because they are the breath of his own; not polished cadences, but utterances as direct as laughter or tears. Since Sappho loved and sang, there has been no such national lyrist as Burns. Fine ballads, mostly anonymous, existed in Scotland previous to his time; and shortly before a few authors had produced a few songs equal to some of his ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Pindar, Anacreon, Sappho, and Horace, are the great masters of lyric poetry among Heathen writers. Pindar's muse, like Sacharissa, is a stately, imperious, and accomplished beauty; equally disdaining the use of art, and the fear of any rival; so intoxicating that it was the highest commendation that could be given an ancient, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho lov'd and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... enormous number of 27,000 documents, every one a glaring fraud. They comprised letters purporting to have been written by such improbable authors as Abelard, Alcibiades, Alexander the Great to Aristotle, Cicero, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Sappho, Anacreon, Pliny, Plutarch, St. Jerome, Diocletian, Juvenal, Socrates, Pompey, and—most stupendous joke of ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... her beauty. She spoke and wrote Latin fluently, composed sonnets in Italian, and delivered Latin orations to the theologians and philosophers who met at her house. Contemporary writings abound in allusions to the rare virtues and learning of "la bella Gallerani," the Sappho of modern times. Scaligero wrote epigrams in her honour, Ortensio Lando classes her with Isabella d'Este and Vittoria Colonna among the most cultured women of the age. The novelist Matteo Bandello, himself a friar of the Dominican convent ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... answered he was very much obliged to him. We were presently afterwards entertained with the most delicious voice I had ever heard, accompanied by a violin, equal to Signior Piantinida. I presently discovered the musician and songster to be Orpheus and Sappho. ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... quick-glancing o'er the park Attracts each light gay meteor of a spark, Agrees as ill with Rufa studying Locke, As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock; Or Sappho at her toilet's greasy task, With Sappho fragrant at an evening masque: So morning insects that in muck begun, Shine, buzz, and fly-blow ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... so.... Lay 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
... 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 sun ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... times his age, and had a face like that picture of a lady over Sappho Smith's letters ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... at 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 of Homer, as ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... 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 ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... done more than take a pinch out of Dryden's snuff-box, which was a point of high ambition and honor at Will's; he had quarrelled with him about a frail poetess, Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, whom Dryden had christened Corinna, and who was also known as Sappho. Gay characterized this literary and eccentric ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Sappho, is it not? and pray was Sappho one of the nine muses? No; then of course she was the tenth—and was not she "the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... 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: ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... most bleak indifference could alter the conviction that 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 new had come—may I not say, the most poetical of ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... "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
... planchette, is more 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 home of Victor Hugo, in Jersey. Nine years later, Auguste ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... yearned to know what Troy signified. Then came Homer, with his heroic fairy-story of gods, demigods and mortals. Of one thing you may be reasonably sure: Helen was kept religiously in the background. You will find no city named after her; nor Sappho, nor Aspasia. The explorer and the geographer have never given woman any recognition; it was left to the poets to sing her praise. Even Columbus, fine old gentleman that he was, absolutely ignored Isabella ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... 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 as marble in the glare of the ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... ladies 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 ascribes ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... 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 Cleopatra, or even ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... been a more skilful move towards the success of her plan than her hint to the baronet that he had made an impression on Celia's heart. For he was not one of those gentlemen who languish after the unattainable Sappho's apple that laughs from the topmost ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... 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 ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... well balanced, the skull sufficiently flat; his eye was almond-shaped and dark-brown in colour, his expression keen and wise, entirely free from the soft look which we see on many of the faces to-day. Historical examples of the show Collie have also been seen in Champions Christopher, Anfield Model, Sappho of Tytton, Parbold ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... 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, ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... 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 in such articles upon a doctor's ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... 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 was invaded by a woman. Its outside repetition ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... comes from classic Greece, Beaming love and breathing peace, With her pure, sweet smiling face, The glory of the Aeolian race, Beauteous Sappho, violet-crowned, Shedding joy and rapture round: In her hand a harp she bears, Parent of celestial airs, Love leaps trembling from each wire, Every chord a string of fire:— How the poet's heart doth beat, How his lips the notes repeat, Till in rapture borne ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... Harold sailed, and passed the barren spot,[140] Where sad Penelope o'erlooked the wave;[12.B.] And onward viewed the mount, not yet forgot, The Lover's refuge, and the Lesbian's grave. Dark Sappho! could not Verse immortal save That breast imbued with such immortal fire? Could she not live who life eternal gave? If life eternal may await the lyre, That only Heaven to which Earth's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Sand had upon me, after the few gifted women, and many charming women whom I have known—after those daughters of the earth, who like Madame Sand said with Sappho: "Come, Mother of Love, to our delicious banquets, fill our cups with the nectar of roses?" As I have placed myself now in fiction and now in reality, the author of Valentine has made on me ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... sonnets, with others, were published by me elsewhere, as I state further on. The volume also contains some of my less faulty translations, as from Sappho, AEschylus, Pythagoras, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, &c. And here I will give a chance specimen out of my "Septuagint of Worthies," to each one of whom I have appropriated a page or two of explanatory prose besides ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... partial to verse, Since none can with justice my pleasures oppose In Holland half-drowned in int'rest and prose? By Greece and past ages what need I be tried When The Hague and the present are both on my side? And is it enough for the joys of the day To think what Anacreon or Sappho would say, When good Vandergoes and his provident Vrow, As they gaze on my triumph, do freely allow, That, search all the province, you'll find no man dar is So blest as the Englishen ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... and translator, b. near Doncaster, and ed. at Camb., after which he took orders. He translated Anacreon, Sappho, and other classics, modernised parts of the poems of Gavin Douglas, and was the author of the well-known song, The Brown Jug, and of two poems, Bramham Park ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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
... dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it. A friend chanced to suggest to him that the story of Sappho would furnish a text for an opera. Grillparzer replied that the subject would perhaps yield a tragedy. The idea took hold of him; without delay or pause for investigation he made his plan; and in three weeks his second play was ready for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, 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 only inferior in individual beauty to the sonnet, which ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... and Punishment, Dostoieffsky Herrmann the Great. The Famous Magicians Tricks. Illustrated, Burlingame Her Sisters Rival, Albert Delpit A Man of Honor, Feuillet The Story of Three Girls, Fawcett Sappho, Daudet The Woman of Fire, Adolphe Belot Sell Not Thyself, Winnifred Kent Hulda: A Romance of the West, Mrs. Shuey The American Monte Cristo, F.C. Long Doctor Rameau, Georges Ohnet The Mummer's Wife, George Moore A Modern Lover, ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... 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 ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... 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 ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... bear a striking likeness to the organs of generation of either sex; it is rarely met with, but if a root resembling the male organ of the human species be found by a man, it will ensure him woman's love; hence it is that Phaon, the Lesbian, was so passionately beloved of Sappho."[80] If it be true, as is asserted by medical writers, that the above root contains an essential oil of peculiarly stimulating qualities, the fact would account, not only for Sappho's passion for Phaon, but also for the high ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... of Lesbos has given many gifts to the world—Lesbian wine and Lesbian verse, the seven-stringed lyre, and the poems of Sappho; but of all its products the latest was assuredly the most questionable, for the last great Lesbians were the ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... have re-written those stanzas, 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 striking ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... 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 to the culture of later generations ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Sappho herself might have owned a touch of passionate tenderness, that he has introduced into another of these ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... in Lesbos—with Sappho and her band of appreciative maidens. Phaon, a poor lad of nineteen, swept some pamphlets and paper- cutters off the center-table, and we all plunged into the ocean of Oolong— the best thing we ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... Margarita de l'Epine, singing Italian songs before and after the Opera. The 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 in substituting homegrown literature for the fashionable ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... more the 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 day When all the world seemed lost in wreck and rout, A wrath of crashing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... 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 ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Admires how 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 ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... 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 problem ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... passion in the volume, only four pieces (for "The Strayed Reveller" can scarcely be so considered) being essentially connected with it. Of these the "Modern Sappho" appears to us not only inferior, but as evidencing less maturity both of thought and style; the second, "Stagyrus," is an urgent appeal to God; the third, "The New Sirens," though passionate in utterance, is, in ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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 which he saw, just as the Devonshire parson ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... doted 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 ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... 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 virtu, and that both may contribute to the improvement of their own country, they have ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... 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 vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man marked out from his fellows, distinguished ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from strange lands Sabinus came, And writings did from divers places frame, White-cheeked Penelope knew Ulysses' sign, The step-dame read Hippolytus' lustless line. 30 AEneas to Elisa answer gives, And Phillis hath to read, if now she lives. Jason's sad letter doth Hypsipyle greet; Sappho her vowed harp lays at Phoebus' feet. Nor of thee, Macer, that resound'st forth arms, Is golden love hid in Mars' mid alarms. There Paris is, and Helen's crimes record, With Laodamia, mate to her dead lord, Unless I err to these thou more incline, Than wars, and ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... 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, ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... For if long locks and general dissoluteness were not an aid and a way to pure thought, why have they been so long his characteristics? If lovers were not necessary for the development of poet, novelist, and actress, why have they always had lovers—Sappho, George Eliot, George Sand, Rachel, Sara? Mrs Kendal nurses children all day and strives to play Rosalind at night. What infatuation, what ridiculous endeavour! To realise the beautiful woodland passion and the idea of the transformation, a woman must have sinned, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... I have sung Anacreon, and learned the Lesbian arts of Sappho? But we have strayed wide of our subject, and time presses. Will ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... sitting under a tree in the orchard near the house, thinking and smoking my pipe, when along the road which ran by the side of the lake came Mr. Vincent on my black horse General and his daughter on my mare Sappho. Instinctively I pulled my straw hat over my eyes, but this precaution was not necessary. They were looking at the beautiful lake, with its hills and overhanging trees, and ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... minds of 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 ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... 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 the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Phrenzy in my Bosom rag'd, And by what Care to be asswag'd? What gentle Youth I could allure, Whom in my artful Toiles secure? Who does thy tender Heart subdue, Tell me, my Sappho, tell me Who? ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... rose-flushed air Now bend above him: Shelley's face is there, And Hugo's, lit with more than kingly pride. Replenished there with splendour, the blind eyes Of Milton bend from heaven to meet his own, Sappho is there, crowned with those queenlier flowers Whose graft outgrew our skies, His gift: Shakespeare leans earthward from his throne With hands outstretched. He ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... 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 ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... have all disappeared, save as her words come to us, quoted by her contemporaries. If the Essays of Emerson should all be swept away, the man would still live in the quotations from his pen, given to us by every writer of worth who has put pencil to paper during the last fifty years. So lives Sappho, and thus did Charles Kingsley secure the composite of the great woman who lives and throbs through his book. Legend pictures her as rarely beautiful, with grace, poise and ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... much has been said of woman's unfitness for public life, it can be seen, from Semiramis to Victoria, that she has a peculiar fitness for governing. In poetry, Sappho was honored with the title of the Tenth Muse. Helena Lucretia Corano, in the seventeenth century, was of such rare scientific attainments, that the most illustrious persons in passing through Venice, were more anxious to see her than all the curiosities ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... worthy of some mythical Greek, some Simonides, some Sappho, but the rest of the lines are commonplace. Throughout his poems there are good bits, happy and golden lines, snatches of grace. He himself knew the quality of his poetry, and ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... 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
... The passengers in the stage-coach were to him so many personages of a comedy. There was an advocate who tried to shine with his dull jokes, an agriculturist to whom travelling had given a certain varnish of civilisation, and a German Sappho who poured forth a stream of pretentious and at the same time ludicrous complaints. The play unwittingly performed by these unpaid actors was enjoyed by our friend with all the zest the feeling of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... compose in the classic taste, when behold! by way of proving the contrary, he has given us a drama simple in its plot, where all the unities are preserved, and where the subject one would think was too well known to produce much interest; he has given, I say, to this piece (Sappho), from the extreme harmony of its versification and the pathos of the sentiments expressed therein, an effect which I doubt any tragedy of Euripides or Sophocles surpasses. The character of Sappho ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the Spirit of Spring. Last Wednesday, when I lost my marquise ring, I was the spirit of vitriol, but now——I'm a poet. I've thought it all out and decided that I shall be the American Sappho. At any moment I am quite likely to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb and indite several stanzas on the back of a calling-card, while the crowd galumps around me in an awed ring.... I feel like kidnapping ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... 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
... 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 |
