Night and day
A mighty hunger yearned within her heart,
And all her veins ran fever,
[Footnote: _Sappho_.]

conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her,

Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love.
[Footnote: _On the Cliffs_.]

It is in this insatiability that Swinburne finds the secret of her
genius, as opposed to the meager desires of ordinary folk. Expressing
her conception of God, he makes Sappho assert,

But having made me, me he shall not slay:
Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his,
Who laugh and love a little, and their kiss
Contents them.

It is, no doubt, an inarticulate conviction that she is "imprisoned in
the body as in an oyster shell," [Footnote: Plato, _Phaedrus_, sec. 250.]
while the force that is wooing her is outside the boundary of the
senses, that accounts for Sappho's agonies of despair. In Sara
Teasdale's _Sappho_ she describes herself,

Who would run at dusk
Along the surges creeping up the shore
When tides come in to ease the hungry beach,
And running, running till the night was black,