vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through
first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of
the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This
is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our
writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and
blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the
ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or
belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho
compares her sensations

Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year
When I love thee.

In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love
of the poetess, she asserts of herself,

I doubt if ever she saw form of man
Or maiden either whom, being beautiful,
She hath not loved.

When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins,

All
That breathes to her is passion, love itself
All passionate.

The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills
her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the
nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines
wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her: