the fleeting moment of passion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says,
[Footnote: In _On the Cliffs_.] "life everlasting of eternal fire."
In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, she exults in her power to
immortalize her passion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea:

Her ways are birth, fecundity and death,
But mine are beauty and immortal love.
Therefore I will be tyrant of myself--
Mine own law will I be! And I will make
Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms
Are wrought of loveliness without decay,
And wild desire without satiety,
And joy and aspiration without death.
And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho!
Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos,
Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens
Are fallen and withered.

To one who craves an absolute aesthetic standard, it is satisfactory to
note how nearly unanimous our poets are in their portrayal of Sappho.
[Footnote: No doubt they are influenced by the glimpse of her given in
Longinus, _On the Sublime_.] This is the more remarkable, since our
enormous ignorance of her life and poetry would give almost free scope
to inventive faculty. It is significant that none of our writers have
been attracted to the picture Welcker gives of her as the respectable
matronly head of a girl's seminary. Instead, she is invariably shown as
mad with an insatiable yearning, tortured by the conviction that her
love can never be satisfied. Charles Kingsley, describing her
temperament,