"Sappho" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mother's room. 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 ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... It was very long, and very dull, and very wordy, and we could scarcely find a more deadly specimen of virtuous and didactic tragedy. Catharine was dreadfully disappointed, nor was she completely consoled by being styled—by no less a person than Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia—"The Sappho of Scotland." She determined, however, to appeal to readers against auditors, and when, two years later, after still further revision, she published The Revolution in Sweden, she dedicated it in most grateful terms to the Duke of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... 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 their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... madden'd Sappho gave, When from Leucate's craggy height she sprung, Could equal that which gave her to the grave, The last sad sound that echo'd ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... but little 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 purpose, a rejection of passion, as having been weighed ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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 ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... 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 Paul lived there in his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 lowly mother Eve ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... talk of that subject.' JOHNSON, (with a loud voice.) 'Sir, I am not saying that you could live in friendship with a man from whom you differ as to some point: I am only saying that I could do it. You put me in mind of Sappho in Ovid[536].' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... charming as a woman of the world,—languid when she pleases, indolent, coquettish, concerned about her toilet, pleased with the airy nothings so seductive to women and to poets. She understands very well that after Madame de Stael there is no place in this century for a Sappho, and that Ninon could not exist in Paris without grands seigneurs and a voluptuous court. She is the Ninon of the intellect; she adores Art and artists; she goes from the poet to the musician, from the sculptor to the prose-writer. Her heart is noble, endowed with a generosity ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but with the voice of Sappho ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... up the lyre Born upon Thracian lands, as foster child; And on its golden strings the restless beatings Of Sappho's and Erinna's flaming hearts ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... AEolian island of Lesbos was the hearth and home of the earlier lyric poets. Among the earliest of the Lesbian singers was the poetess Sappho, whom the Greeks exalted to a place next to Homer. Plato calls her the Tenth Muse. Although her fame endures, her poetry, except some mere ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... 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 is very ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... instances it seems to me that the best things done by women equal the best things done by men in those lines. The best verses of Sappho, the best sonnets of Mrs. Browning, the best chapters of George Eliot, the best animal paintings of Rosa Bonheur, do not seem to me surpassed by their rivals in masculine work. If anything in verse of its sort is nobler than Mrs. Howe's "Battle Hymn ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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
... the love poetry of women?" asked the Professor. "Did ever passion heat words to incandescence as it did those of Sappho?" ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a favorite member of the Chit-Chat Club for many years and wrote many brilliant essays, a volume of which was printed in 1893. The first two he gave were "Francis Petrarch" and "Burning Sappho." Among the most charming was "Ballads and Lyrics," which was illustrated by the equally charming singing of representative selections by Mrs. Ida Norton, the only time in its history when the club was invaded by a woman. Its outside repetition was clamored for, and as the Judge found a ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... has become of this minstrel who sang the Minnelieder of the Car-barns? Like Homer, like Omar, like Sappho, like Shakespeare, he is a Voice singing out of the mists. He was but a Name to his employers; and his friends, if he has friends, remember him not. These Sonnets, written neatly on twenty-six violet transfer-slips, were discovered, ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... melancholy sea, keeping a true heart for an absent brother? Which of them could raise his fellows nearer to the source of all Deity, as Socrates and Plato had raised men? Who could portray himself as Phidias had portrayed Athene? Could the Muses speak with their own voices as they had spoken by Sappho's? He was especially pleased to see his own moral superiority to Zeus so eloquently enforced by AEschylus, and delighted in criticising the sentiments which the other poets had put into the mouths of the gods. Homer, he thought, must have been in Olympus often, and Aristophanes not ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... that 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 needs ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... of Alypius was tempered by severe justice and manly fortitude; and while he exercised his abilities in the civil administration of Britain, he imitated, in his poetical compositions, the harmony and softness of the odes of Sappho. This minister, to whom Julian communicated, without reserve, his most careless levities, and his most serious counsels, received an extraordinary commission to restore, in its pristine beauty, the temple of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... 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, and ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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
... traced in the lines of light the patriarchal 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 ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... 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 Rock into ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the Isle of Yap, Where burning Sappho never sung! You ain't so much upon the map, But ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... were much in the hands of poetical readers, he was tempted to try his own skill in giving Chaucer a more fashionable appearance, and put "January and May" and the "Prologue of the Wife of Bath" into modern English. He translated likewise the Epistle of "Sappho to Phaon" from Ovid, to complete the version, which was before imperfect, and wrote some other small pieces, which he afterwards printed. He sometimes imitated the English poets, and professed to have written at fourteen his ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... furrow. They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in their first aspirations is yet true; and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis, none can,—certainly not she? Why not? She has a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... other hand, the 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
... it was all over, Mr. Sutcliffe took her back into the house, and there on the hall table were the books he had got for her from the London Library: The Heine, the Goethe's Faust, the Sappho, the Darwin's Origin of Species, the Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... us that the Dardanelles Straits were the Hellespont of the Ancient world, and the neighbouring AEgean Sea the most mystic of the "wine-dark seas of Greece": he retold stories of Jason and the Argonauts; of "Burning Sappho" in Lesbos; of Achilles in Scyros; of Poseidon sitting upon Samothrace to watch the fight at Troy; and of St. John the Divine at Patmos gazing up ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... instance, with their marvelous music 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, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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 ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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 the spirit of the country festivals ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... and one of them alluded to an expression in my former letter; so I have taken your two first verses, with a slight alteration in the second, and have added a third, but you must help me to a fourth. Here they are; the latter half of the first stanza would have been worthy of Sappho; I am in ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... 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, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... vehemence. The Cherokee, arrayed in fringed buckskin and blue beads, rented from a costumer, intoned folk songs of his people in the vernacular. The elocutionist in cheese-cloth toga and tin bracelets, rendered "The Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung." The Chinaman, in the robes of a mandarin, lectured on Confucius. The Armenian, in fez and baggy trousers, spoke of the Unspeakable Turk. The mandolin player, dressed like a bull fighter, held musical conversaziones, interpreting ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Milton thrives; Eschylus' pen Will Shakspeare drives; Wee Pope, the knurlin, 'till him rives Horatian fame; In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives Even Sappho's flame. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... 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 ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... last night at Bulwer's was really brilliant, much more so than the first. There were a great many dames of distinction, and no blues. I should, perhaps, except Sappho, who was quite changed; she had thrown off Greco-Bromptonian costume and was perfectly a la Francaise and really looked pretty. At the end of the evening I addressed a few words to her, of the value of which ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... "Vita Nuova;" a book, to find any equivalent for whose reality and completeness of passion, though it is passion for a woman whom the poet scarcely knows and of whom he desires nothing, we must go back to the merest fleshly love of Antiquity, of Sappho or Catullus; for modern times are too hesitating and weak. So at least it seems; but in fact, if we only think over the matter, we shall find that in no earthly love can we find this reality and completeness: it is possible only in love like Dante's. For ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... about three times his age, and had a face like that picture of a lady over Sappho Smith's letters ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... conspicuous of which can be traced to classical influence; but no one would contend that these qualities are the rule in our great writers. The English genius is rich and lavish rather than restrained. It is less in its nature to write like Sappho, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Or as thy Sappho, when too fierce assailed By stern ingratitude her tender breast:— Her love by scorn repaid Her friendship true betrayed, Sick of the guileful earth, she sank for rest In the cold waves embrace; while Grecian ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... suing, sighing, wooing, sad and merry hours, Blisses tasted, kisses wasted, building Babel's towers! Hearts were aching, hearts were breaking, lashes wet with dew, When the ships touched the lips of islands Sappho knew; Yearning breasts and burning breasts, cold at last, are hid Amid the glooms of carven tombs in Khufu's pyramid— Though the sages, down the ages, smile their cynic doubt, Man and maid, unafraid, put the schools to rout; Seek to chain love ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... 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 ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... down 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 only in the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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 ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... 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 value set upon it by ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... be hard to say whether Chicago society is more deeply interested in the circus which is exhibiting on the lake-front this week, than in the compilation of Sappho's complete works just published in London, and but this week given to the trade in Chicago. As we understand it, Sappho and the circus had their beginning about the same time: if any thing, the origin of the circus antedated Sappho's birth some years, and has ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... beliefs which held them in their place; and 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, ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... When Sappho struck the quivering wire, The throbbing breast was all on fire: And when she raised the vocal lay, The captive ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... apologise for entering so pompously into the minutiae of my bit of a story, as if it were the lost poems of Sappho; but it appears that the subject interests the public, and I comply with my instructions. I take it, then, that the origins of "The Bowmen" were composite. First of all, all ages and nations have cherished the thought ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... in a more graceful way. People said she was the greatest woman author of her day. "You mean of all time," corrected Diderot. They called her "the High Priestess of Letters," "the Minerva of Poetry," "Sappho Returned," and all that. Her commendation meant success and her indifference failure. She knew politics, too, and her hands were on all wires. Did she wish to placate a minister, she invited him to call, and once there he was as putty in her hands. She ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... '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 out. ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... an afternoon 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 ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... her he composed his famous "Treatise on the Sublime," a work which is not only admirable for its intrinsic excellence, but most valuable as having preserved to our times many beautiful fragments of ancient poets whose works are now lost, particularly those of Sappho. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... OF SAPPHO.—If all the poets and all the lovers of poetry should be asked to name the most precious of the priceless things which time has wrung in tribute from the triumphs of human genius, the answer which would rush to every tongue would be "The Lost Poems of Sappho." ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... her in the Boulevard de Strasbourg, and then Tom suggested a visit to the Luxembourg Gallery. It was true: a life-sized statue of Sappho, signed 'Dolbiac,' did in feet occupy a prominent place in the sculpture-room. Henry was impressed; so also was Tom, who explained to his young cousin all ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... shoe came next. 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 ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... 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
... 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 give a reason. A literal translation ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... beam-ends; and as we cannot right it again, in order to take a second glance at the poet of Medea, we must pass on to the next. "Sophocles" will be acceptable to scholars. "Hesiod" is excellent. "Cared most for gods and bulls" is worth any money. "Pindar" and "Sappho" are but so so. The picture of "Theocritus" is very beautiful. There is nothing particularly felicitous in the sketch of "Aristophanes." How much more graphic is what Milton, in one of his prose works, says with respect to the "holy Chrysostom's" study of the same. Chrysostom, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... was more or less correct, kept them from visiting at La Baudraye. Dinah, attainted and convicted of pedantry, because she spoke grammatically, was nicknamed the Sappho of Saint-Satur. At last everybody made insolent game of the great qualities of the woman who had thus roused the enmity of the ladies of Sancerre. And they ended by denying a superiority—after all, merely comparative!—which emphasized their ignorance, and did not forgive it. Where the ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... withheld their deepest and most poignant wisdom because of a native reticence of speech. Many a time they reach a heaven of understanding shut to men; but when they come back, they cannot tell the world. The rare artists among women, like Sappho and Mrs. Browning and Christina Rossetti and Laurence Hope, in their several different ways, have gotten themselves expressed only through a sublime and glorious unashamedness. As Hawthorne once remarked very wisely, women have achieved art only when they have stood naked ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... reached the spot where the donkeys were waiting for them. Margaret's was a fine, well-bred animal, called Sappho, with a skin as smooth as a white suede glove; it stood almost as high as a mule. Her saddle, too, was a new one, and well-fitting—Freddy had seen to that. The old Sheikh, who was turbanned and robed after the manner of Moses or Aaron, was presented to her. His pale grey camel was ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... squaresail. Here had been the men of Rhodes, sailors and fighters both. Here the Greek penteconters with their sails and rigging of purple and black. Here the Cypriotes had sailed under the lee of the islands Byron loved and where Sappho sang her songs like wine and honey, sharp wine and golden honey. Here had the Roman galleys splashed and here the great Venetian boats set proud sail against the Genoese. Here had the Lion-heart sailed gallantly to Palestine. Here had Icarus fallen in the blue sea. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... on poems of passion, And put my own pantings in rime, To celebrate, after a fashion, The damsels who took up my time. I fed upon Swinburne, believe me, I feasted on Byron and Burns, And couplets from Sappho would give ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... friends of Miss Rich, who carried me to dine with them at 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
... 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 to women at that time was poetry. There was no other form ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... 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 then jointly composing, ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... not, like the drama, for the expression of dissatisfaction. Anna Byns, an oracle with the Catholic party, wrote when the language was in its most degenerate state, under Margaret of Austria. She was styled the Sappho of Brabant, though her poems are all religious. They were translated into Latin, and were read as masterpieces till the middle of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 is the profoundly balanced humour of Aristophanes, at once ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... by 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 tomb, clasped ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the highest estimation by the Athenians, and was courted by kings and princes. Born in Thebes 522 B.C., he died probably in his eightieth year, being contemporary with Aeschylus and the battle of Marathon. We possess also fragments of Sappho, Simonides, Anacreon, and others, enough to show that could the lyrical poetry of Greece be recovered, we should probably possess the richest collection ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Paris and St. Petersburg. He is described "Musis Amicus";[4] and not only the friend of poesy, he was a poet himself, and by virtue of the duality habitual to his mind dedicated his pen with singular impartiality to Christ and Apollo; one volume of verses being entitled 'Anacreon and Sappho,' another, containing a poem, on 'The Love of God.' These products rise somewhat above the level of respectable mediocrity, yet they have not escaped the stigma of platitudes. Goethe, however, did not disdain to make respectful mention of the poet. The painter inherited in some small degree ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... robbed her salon of its 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 ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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 ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... 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 ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... "A Sappho in mittens!" he cried laughingly, and at her eager question told her to look up the unknown lady in the school encyclopedia, when she was admitted to the Female ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... into 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 ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... &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
... one happy day, What I should call her in my lay; By what sweet name from Rome or Greece; Lalage, Neaera, Chloris, Sappho, Lesbia, or ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... the whole sex, and to me it appears clear, that they all spring from want of understanding. Whether this arises from a physical or accidental weakness of faculties, time alone can determine; for I shall not lay any great stress upon the example of a few women (Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs. Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame d'Eon, etc. These, and many more, may be reckoned exceptions; and, are not all heroes, as well as heroines, exceptions to general rules? I ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... were to tell him, for instance, that the desire of beauty is in itself a morality." It was, perhaps, the only morality the Greeks knew, and upon the memory of Greece we have been living ever since. In becoming hetairae, Aspasia, Lais, Phryne, and Sappho became the distributors of that desire of beauty necessary in a state which had already begun to dream the ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 sinner against the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... quod in aliorum scriptis vertant vitio, all fools with them that cannot find fault; they correct others, and are hot in a cold cause, puzzle themselves to find out how many streets in Rome, houses, gates, towers, Homer's country, Aeneas's mother, Niobe's daughters, an Sappho publica fuerit? ovum [731]prius extiterit an gallina! &c. et alia quae dediscenda essent scire, si scires, as [732]Seneca holds. What clothes the senators did wear in Rome, what shoes, how they sat, where they went to the close-stool, how many dishes in a mess, what sauce, which for the present ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... and there Mr. P. got out his lines and commenced to fish, trolling his bait behind as the boat slowly sailed, under the hot sun, among those lovely isles, where, to be sure, burning's half o' the sport, but where "burning SAPPHO" would have lost herself utterly, and probably have tumbled into some of the watery intricacies and have put ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... another thing, 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
... 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 ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... that you spoke true!" said she, with sparkling eyes and a deeper flush upon her cheeks. "Let me be a poetess like Sappho, and I would, like her, joyfully leap from the rocks into the sea. Oh, there are yet poetesses—Carlo has told me of them. All Rome now worships the great improvisatrice, Corilla. I should like to know her, Paulo, only to adore her, only to ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the thoroughly reputable standing of his house. He bobbed about among men, a veritable bundle of enthusiasm—no power worthy the name of intellect, no thoughts worthy the adjective noble, no feelings long continued in one strain. A Madame Sappho would have called him a pig; a Shakespeare would have said "my merry child"; old, drinking Caryoe thought him a clever, successful businessman. In short, he was as good ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... realms of the supernatural, the only great name that the student will find among the musical women of Greece is that of Sappho. The story of her life is known only in its general outlines, and even these have been the subject of many learned disputes. She was born near the close of the seventh century B.C., either at Mytilene or at Eresos in the island of Lesbos. She grew to maturity ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... Sappho did not write epics that is no reason why Dante should not. It is the old story of the tailless fox. Brangwyn as well as Anders Zorn has been called a rough-and-ready artist. For exquisite tone and pattern we must go to Whistler and his school. Brangwyn is never exquisite, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... observe that "demonstration" is a strong term.—In his description of the Leucadian Promontory (of which we have a pleasing representation in the plate), the author remarks that it is "celebrated for the leap of Sappho, and the death of Artemisia." From this variety in the expression, a reader would hardly conceive that both the ladies perished in the same manner: in fact, the sentence is as proper as it would be to talk of the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... ask: Who was Jan Vermeer, or Van der Meer? "What songs did the sirens sing?" puzzled good old Sir Thomas Browne, and we know far more about William Shakespeare or Sappho or Memling than we do of the enigmatic man from Delft who died a double death in 1675; not only the death of the body, but the death of the spirit, of his immortal art. For several centuries he was not accorded the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Hathor. And weren't all the best gods goddesses, when you come to think of it? Women used to drive their own chariots, as we do our motors, and hold salons, like the French ladies. There was Rhodopis, for instance, who married the brother of Sappho. I wonder if Colonel Corkran could have told you that the story of Cinderella comes from an anecdote of Rhodopis? I hardly think that he's been able to spare enough time from bridge to study Strabo, who was the Baedeker of Egypt for tourists six hundred ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... 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!" 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 ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... dived for love, Leucadia's cliff The Lesbian Sappho leap'd 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 ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... to have thrown his little makeshift of a body, in its canvas bodice and its three pairs of stockings, at her feet, with the result that she burst out laughing. Pope took his revenge in the Epistle to Martha Blount, where, describing Lady Mary as Sappho, he declared of another lady that her different aspects agreed as ill ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... incandescent though fed not otherwise than by sunlight and moonshine. If it alone survive, it may resolve the poetic fame of either into one imperishable, luminous ray of white light: as the uttered song fused in the deathless passion of Sappho gleams star-like down the centuries from the high ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... are considering the powers of evil were very real. Men instinctively accepted the existence of a kingdom of darkness, extending its borders over the sphere of knowledge as over the other sides of human activity. Greek was the language of some of the most licentious literature—Sappho's poems were burnt by the Church at Constantinople in 1073—and of many detestable heresies; and thus though the Council of Vienne, with missionary zeal, had recommended in 1311 that lectures in Greek—as in other languages of the heretical East—should be established ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Sappho on a summer night. Her nightingales were singing in the trees Beside the castled river; and the wind Fell like a woman's fingers on my cheek. And then I slept and dreamed and marked no change; The night went on with me into my ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... now 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 ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... as most like Milton in consummate art and permanent exquisiteness of phrase. It is to him, also, (if to any one), that Milton is metrically indebted.—The other poets classed as 'Imperial' are Homer, Sappho, Archilochus, Dante, Shakespeare. The supremacy in rank which the writer has here ventured to limit to these seven poets, (though with a strong feeling of diffidence in view of certain other Hellenic ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Should your people in tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of."'[32] Addison also inserted and praised in the Spectator Philips's translations from Sappho (Nos. 223, 229). ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... 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 with Helen of Greece; and again, when he tired of ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... 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 ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... 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 nameless sorrow's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... 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 their ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... 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
... writer in his day, though now little known, except for his Critical Observations upon the Cid; the other, a still more prolific author of novels, and alternately styled by her contemporaries the Sappho of her age, and "un boutique de verbiage;" but unquestionably a writer of merit, notwithstanding the many unmanly sneers of Boileau, whose bitter pen, like that of our own illustrious satirist, could ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my present fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessing Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As to Sappho's Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital held some plain men of middle stature and slow conversational powers, the addition of myself to their number, though clad in the majestic folds of the himation and without cravat, would hardly have ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... 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 ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... beauty forbidden to the gentler spirit of her sister. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine breaks the bonds of ordinary sensual or sentimental relationship and hurls itself into that darker, stranger, more unearthly air, wherein one hears the voices of the great lovers; and where Sappho and Michaelangelo and Swift and Shelley and Nietzsche gasp forth their imprecations and their terrible ecstasies. Crude and rough and jagged and pitiless, the style of this astounding book seems to rend and tear, like a broken saw, at the very roots ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... 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 ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the Pleiades and moon, Lo! of night it is the noon! See! the Hours their watch are keeping; Lovely lieth SAPPHO sleeping! ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the most beautiful women of antiquity, such as those of Julia Pia in the Vatican, and of the Capitoline Venus in the Museum of the Capitol, were made of this marble, obtained from the birthplace of Sappho. More beautiful is the kind known as the Marmor Tyrium, or the Greco-Turchinicchio, which has a light bluish tinge. It was shipped by the ancients at the port of Tyre from some unknown quarry in Mount Lebanon, which supplied the marble used without stint in the building and decoration of Solomon's ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Huysmans and Leconte de Lisle; he is also engaged on a "Historia Amoris." There is an interesting passage relating to the names of great writers. Alphabet Jones assures us that they are always "in two syllables with the accent on the first. Oyez: Homer, Sappho, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Hugo, Swinburne ... Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, Michelet, Renan." The reader is permitted to ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... 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 ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... known thee to thy heart's own heart, Nor ever have given light ear to storied song That did thy sweet name sweet unwitting wrong, Nor ever have called thee nor would call for shame, Thou knowest, but inly by thine only name, Sappho—because I have known thee and loved, hast thou None other answer now? As brother and sister were we, child and bird, Since thy first Lesbian word Flamed on me, and I knew not whence I knew This was the song that struck my whole soul through, Pierced my keen spirit of sense with edge more ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... goat-skins never ceased. From this bedlam there occasionally emerged a splinter of tune, like a plank thrown up by the sea. Stannum could discern no melody, though he grasped its beginnings; double flutes gave him the modes, Dorian, Phrygian, AEolian, Lydian and Ionian; after Sappho and her Mixolydian mode, he longed for ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... to me to be jesting, like that scribe who told me of Krophi and Mophi; for Rhodopis lived in the days of King Amasis and of Sappho the minstrel, and was beloved by Charaxus, the brother of Sappho, wherefore Sappho reviled him in a song. How then could Rhodopis, who flourished more than a hundred years before my ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... prophetess of the Israelites; Queen Esther, who, with the counsel of her cousin, Mordecai, not only saved the Jews from extermination, but lifted them from a condition of slavery into prosperity and power; Dido, the founder of Carthage; Sappho, the eminent Grecian poetess; Hypatia, the eloquent philosopher; Mary, the mother of Christ; Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra; the mother of St. Augustine; Elizabeth of Hungary; Queen Elizabeth of England; Queen Isabella ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs |
