Her long thin hands, and ivory-channell'd feet,
Were wasted with the wasting of her soul.
Then peevishly she flung her on her face,
And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare,
And fingered at the grass, and tried to cool
Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward:
And then she raised her head, and upward cast
Wild looks from homeless eyes, whose liquid light
Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair,
As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks
Of deep Parnassus, at the mournful moon.
Beside her lay a lyre. She snatched the shell,
And waked wild music from its silver strings;
Then tossed it sadly by,--'Ah, hush!' she cries,
'Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine!
Why mock my discords with thine harmonies?
'Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine,
Only to echo back in every tone,
The moods of nobler natures than thine own.'


'No!' she said. 'That soft and rounded rhyme suits ill with
Sappho's fitful and wayward agonies. She should burst out at once
into wild passionate life-weariness, and disgust at that universe,
with whose beauty she has filled her eyes in vain, to find it always
a dead picture, unsatisfying, unloving--as I have found it.'

Sweet self-deceiver! had you no other reason for choosing as your
heroine Sappho, the victim of the idolatry of intellect--trying in
vain to fill her heart with the friendship of her own sex, and then