"Sappho" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about the Surintendant talent, fashion, and beauty. Some of the ablest men in the kingdom were in his employ. Pellisson, famous for ugliness and for wit, the Acanthe of the Hotel de Rambouillet, the beloved of Sappho Scudery, was his chief clerk. Pellisson was then a Protestant; but Fouquet's disgrace, and four years in the Bastille, led him to reexamine the grounds of his religious faith. He became, luckily, enlightened on the subject of his heresies at a time when the renunciation of Protestantism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... 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 ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I was wrapping up 'Sappho' and ordering her a book with a title that sounded like a college yell, she told me she was getting on a higher plane, and I bowed her out. Say, Hen—now wouldn't that jar you?—the Ex getting on ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... 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 and Roman claims), is assigned to Sappho and Archilochus, less on account ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... the hand of the pretty country-heiress, promising 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 temperament sought in vain for moral sympathy from ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... one, isn't it? I have heard of her from the students, and also from the professors of the University. One of my friends raves about her Greek profile and her straight black brows. He calls her his silent Sappho, but I fancy Odalisque is a better name for her. There is no brain ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... Doctor. That is Sappho, is it not? and pray was Sappho one of the nine muses? No; then of course she was the tenth—and was not she "the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho—absorbing to intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that kept pouring from those long ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... about women is that they're too fond of pleasure to settle down. How often one hears statements such as 'Juno Jones wouldn't make a good wife, she's out all day playing golf;' or 'I couldn't afford to marry Sappho Smith, she's too fond of dress and theatre-going.' God bless the man! What else have the poor girls to do? Sappho has a taste for dainty clothes and a love for the theatre; she fills her empty existence with these things as far as ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... the sun sank, the crags burned deeper with scarlet blushes as of blood, and with passionate bloom as of pomegranate or oleander flowers. Could Turner rise from the grave to paint a picture that should bear the name of 'Sappho's Leap,' he might strive to paint it thus: and the world would complain that he had dreamed the poetry of his picture. But who could dream anything so wild and yet so definite? Only the passion of orchestras, the fire-flight ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... life in lands whose winters are as burning summers. Elsie Venner is not sensual, and sensuality is the leading trait of the human-serpent nature. Herein lies an error, just as a sculptor would err who should present Lady Godiva as fully draped, or Sappho merely as a sweet singer of Lesbos, or Antinous only as a fine young man. He who would harrow hell and rake out the devil, and then exhibit to us an ordinary sinner, or an opera bouffe "Mefistofele," as the result, reminds one of the seven Suabians who went to hunt a monster,—"a Ungeheuer,"—and ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... my Glaucus,' said Clodius, 'that Ione is a stranger who has but lately come to Pompeii. She sings like Sappho, and her songs are her own composing; and as for the tibia, and the cithara, and the lyre, I know not in which she most outdoes the Muses. Her beauty is most dazzling. Her house is perfect; such taste—such gems—such ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... false as it is foolish. Homer's glory depended upon his present popularity: he recited,—and without the strongest impression of the moment, who would have gotten the Iliad by heart, and given it to tradition? Ennius, Terence, Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Theocritus, all the great poets of antiquity, were the delight of their contemporaries.[3] The very existence of a poet, previous to the invention of printing, depended upon his present popularity; and how often has it impaired his future fame? Hardly ever. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, and not yet 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 made a sensation ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... laudable is that high emotion, Muse more rapturous, you, than any Sappho. The Great Mother ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... this matter of love considered as a disorder of mind and body, I recall a recent magazine article of Mr. Finck's, in which he analyzes Sappho's conception of love. "In that famous poem of Sappho," he says, "that has been so often declared a compendium of all the emotions that make up love, I have not been able to find anything but a comic catalogue of such feelings as might overwhelm a woman if ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... beautiful!' Well, and what beside? There is nothing beside; oh, disappointed and therefore enraged reader; positively this is the sum-total of what I can recall from the wreck of years; and certainly it is not much. Even of Sappho, though time has made mere ducks and drakes of her lyrics, we have rather more spared to us than this. And yet this trifle, simple as you think it, this shred of a fragment, if the reader will believe ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically. Hence the male feminisme whereby the man becomes patiens as well as agens, and the woman a tribade, a votary of mascula Sappho,[FN364] Queen of Frictrices or Rubbers.[FN365] Prof. Mantegazza claims to have discovered the cause of this pathological love, this perversion of the erotic sense, one of the marvellous list of amorous vagaries which deserve, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Lead kindly Light is no better poem than many a tasteless version of a Psalm: if in the excitement of patriotism, why is Scots, wha hae superior to We don't want to fight? if in the mitigation of the passions, the Odes of Sappho will win but little praise: if in instruction, Armstrong's Art of preserving Health ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... given it the name by which it is chiefly known—the Sappho comet, or bar-tailed humming-bird. It is a migratory bird, seldom, however, found so far north. It is a native of Bolivia, where it is found in gardens, and near the abodes of men, of whom it seems to have no fear. In ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... otherwhere; The soldier fears the mask'd retreat Of Parthia; Parthia dreads the thrall Of Rome; but Death with noiseless feet Has stolen and will steal on all. How near dark Pluto's court I stood, And AEacus' judicial throne, The blest seclusion of the good, And Sappho, with sweet lyric moan Bewailing her ungentle sex, And thee, Alcaeus, louder far Chanting thy tale of woful wrecks, Of woful exile, woful war! In sacred awe the silent dead Attend on each: but when the song Of combat tells and tyrants fled, Keen ears, press'd shoulders, closer ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... myself on this point, I will ask the reader to recall any one of Mr. Alma Tadema's pictures; it matters not a jot which is chosen. That one, for instance, where, in a circular recess of white marble, Sappho reads to a Greek poet, or is it the young man who is reading to Sappho and her maidens? The interest of the picture is purely archaeological. According to the very latest researches, the ornament which Greek women wore in their hair was of such a shape, and Mr. Tadema ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Where from the hearths, a fragrance of burnt wood, Blue-purple smoke creeps like a stain of wine Along the paved blue sea: yea, all this kindness Lies amid salt immeasurable flowing, The power of the sea, passion of love. I, Sappho, have made love the mastery Most sacred over man; but I have made it A safety of things gloriously known, To house his spirit from the darkness blowing Out of the vast unknown: from me he hath The wilful mind to make his fortune fair. Yea, here I stand for the whole earth to see How life, ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... of the word. He wasn't a flunkey, a fool, or a prig, if that's what you mean. He wasn't perhaps on Mrs Grundy's visiting list. He wasn't exactly gregarious. And yet in a sense that kind of temperament is so rare that Sappho, Nelson, and Shelley shared it. To the stodgy, suety world of course it's little else than sheer moonshine, midsummer madness. Naturally, in its own charming and stodgy way the world kept flickering cold water in his direction. Naturally it hissed.... I shall find the book. You ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... 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 that ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... "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 ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... intensity, which is attained by selection of those sensory images which are significant. Thus the treatise praises the ode by Sappho which it quotes, because the poet has taken the emotions incident to the frenzy of love from the attendant symptoms, from actuality, and first selected and then closely combined those which were conspicuous and intense.[30] This intensity which is characteristic of the poet he contrasts with the ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... 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 ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... Jock 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
... ask'd my fair one happy day, What I should call her in my lay; By what sweet name from Rome or Greece; Lalage, Nesera, Chloris, Sappho, Lesbia, or ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... been witnessed. An October sun gilded the thousand beauties of an Ionian landscape. Athens and Corinth were behind the combatants, the mountains of Alexander's Macedon rose in the distance; the rock of Sappho and the heights of Actium, were before their eyes. Since the day when the world had been lost and won beneath that famous promontory, no such combat as the one now approaching had been fought upon the waves. The chivalrous young commander despatched ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Yet the quality of their love, if one may say so, is very different from anything Hebrew, or, for the matter of that, Greek or Roman; their ardour is not a transient phenomenon which disturbs them, like that of the Shulamite, or the lover described by Sappho or Plato, but a chief business of their life, as in the case of Dante, of Petrarch, of Francesca and Paolo, or Tristram and Yseult. Indeed, it is difficult to guess whether this self-satisfied, self-glorifying ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... chamber, to 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.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... a rake, 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 Beginning with ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... of France are not very handsome, they are sensible and witty. To many of them, without the least flattery, may be applied the distich which Sappho ascribes ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... "I now declare it in your house: this work, printed under my name, is by my sister—she who translated 'Sappho' so agreeably." And without being asked, he recited in a declamatory tone ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... feel the approach of age, and to wither under the preference given to younger men—a preference rendered each day more decided in a country where statesmen are jostled aside by beardless boys, and the senseless giggle of pert school girls might drive Sappho into a second watery grave, sickened with disgust. His personal vanity became almost a monomania, and he sat there, clutching Mabel's book, pale as death, and with flecks of foam gathering upon his lips, longing to appease his mortified vanity by tearing fiercely at ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... float with the moon-ark of 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 of Grillparzer, upon ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... 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 ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... there was silence. But Eudora, true to the restless vivacity of her character, soon seized her lyre, and carelessly touching the strings, she hummed one of Sappho's ardent songs: ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... extraordinary beauty worthy of some mythical Greek, some Simonides, some Sappho, but the rest of the lines are commonplace. Throughout his poems there are good bits, happy and golden lines, snatches of grace. He himself knew the quality of his poetry, and wrote ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Lady Throckmorton. "Only innocent. But I can tell you all about Priscilla in a dozen words. Priscilla is a modern Sappho. Priscilla is an elderly young lady, who never was a girl—Priscilla is my poor Denis ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the sun's distance. They frequently recur; they need no elaborate preparation; a single astronomer armed with a heliometer can do all the requisite work. Dr. Gill, however, organized a more complex plan of operations upon Iris in 1888, and upon Victoria and Sappho in 1889. A novel method was adopted. Its object was to secure simultaneous observations made from opposite sides of the globe just when the planet lay in the plane passing through the centre of the earth and the two observers, the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... dine with them at Batheaston, 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 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 ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the 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 World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... high hall held of rare and strange: For on the king's right hand Leoena bowed In cloudlike marble, and beside her crouched The tongueless lioness; on the other side, And poising this, the second Sappho stood,— Young Erexcea, with her head discrowned, The anadema on the horn of her lyre: And by the walls there hung in sequence long Merlin himself, and Uterpendragon, With all their mighty deeds, down to the day When all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... doted 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
... 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 sun ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... no inferiority of mental power. Mrs. Belle de Rivera (N. Y.) depicted Women of Genius, quoting Sappho, Margaret of Navarre, Vittoria Colonna, Angelica Kauffman and others eminent in the annals of history. A newspaper report said of Mrs. Oreola Williams Haskell (N. Y.): "The thoroughness of her address gave the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... in the bliss of the hour. If Graham could have read her heart, he would have dismissed all doubt whether he could dominate her life. Could a Fate or an Angel have said to her, "Choose,—on one side I promise you the glories of a Catalani, a Pasta, a Sappho, a De Stael, a Georges Sand, all combined into one immortal name; or, on the other side, the whole heart of the man who would estrange himself from you if you had such combination of glories,"—her answer would have brought Graham Vane to her feet. All scruples, all doubts, would ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... live near that precipice—it might come in handy. There was nothing of the right sort in Paris, she declared; only five-storey hotels and suchlike; the notion of casting herself down from one of those artificial eminences did not appeal to her high-strung temperament; she craved to die like Sappho, her ideal. An architect was despatched, the ground purchased, the house built and furnished. That done, she settled up her affairs in France and established herself at Mon Repos. On the evening of her arrival she climbed the little height at the back of her domain ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 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
... 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 eulogist ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... witty for us, or to solve us problems. Believe me, there is more thought, more eloquence, in the corners of a beautiful mouth—the upward look of two dark eyes—than in all women have said or done from Sappho down. Springy colour, light, music, perfume: they are all to be found in the curves of a perfect ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of the season has been Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh.' I could wish some things altered, I confess; but as it is, it is by far (a hundred times over) the finest poem ever written by a woman. We know little or nothing of Sappho,—nothing to induce comparison,—and all other wearers of petticoats must ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... maiden chidden by her mother for dreaming of Sappho, and Lesbian dances and Delphian ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... schools of rhapsodies lasted for about 250 years, 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 Euripides about ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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 her, left her ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... 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
... This distinguished actress for a long time reigned supreme in her art. Her deep sensibilities and dramatic instincts, her noble elocution and stately beauty, fitted her admirably for tragedy. In such parts as Phedre, Medea, Lady Macbeth, Merope, Sappho, Jeanne de Montfaucon, and Isabella in "The Bride of Messina," she had no pere. Wilhelmina Schroeder was born in Hamburg, October 6, 1805, and was destined by her mother for a stage career. In pursuance of this, the child appeared at the age of five ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... the book that you are reading from— What if Leander did swim the Hellespont? And what if burning Sappho Did sing? What do I care for Launcelot and Elaine, Or Tristram and Isolt, Or ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... elopement of Mrs. Eliz. Haywood, wife of Rev. Valentine Haywood.[5] The causes of Eliza's flight are unknown. Our only knowledge of her temperament in her early life comes from a remark by Nichols that the character of Sappho in the "Tatler"[6] may be "assigned with ...probability and confidence, to Mrs. Elizabeth Heywood, who ...was in all respects just such a character as is exhibited here." Sappho is described by Steele as "a fine lady, who writes verses, sings, dances, and can say and do whatever ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... vitriario," shows that glassmaking was a Salonitan industry. Beneath the presbytery remains of an earlier building were discovered with a pagan mosaic of the second or third century, representing the poetess Sappho and the nine muses. The ambulatory is also floored with mosaic, ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... of Sappho was Atthis. By Atossa is generally understood Vashti, daughter of Cyrus and wife of Ahasuerus of the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... 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 ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... suggested. 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
... to translate, but Sappho and Cleopatra expressed it in their lives; perhaps ardent in love would be ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... 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 ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... of 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, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... ALCAEUS and SAPPHO were both natives of Mytilene in the island of Lesbos, and flourished about B.C. 610-580. Their songs were composed for a single voice, and not for the chorus, and they were each the inventor of a new metre, which bears their name, and is familiar to ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... is left, the common residuum, to all these literary masters; to Homer, Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus, Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere; to Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in subject, and style, in ideas and ideals, in range ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... 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 Aristophanes was born. Bright-eyed Shelley ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... of the more famous poet whom he addressed as "violet-crowned, pure, sweetly-smiling Sappho," was a native of Mitylene in Lesbos. His period of work fell probably between 610 and 580 B.C. At this time his native town was disturbed by an unceasing contention for power between the aristocracy and the people; and Alcaeus, through the vehemence of his zeal and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and summer, so even for those celebrated languages there was but a season of splendour, and, compared with the whole course of their duration, but a brief season. Since, then, English has had its great writers for a term of about three hundred years,—as long, that is, as the period from Sappho to Demosthenes, or from Pisistratus to Arcesilas, or from AEschylus and Pindar to Carneades, or from Ennius to Pliny,—we should have no right to be disappointed if the classical period be ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... nothing. There is, indeed, a single trace, of which the most has been made, in the Memoirs of Fléchier, describing his stay at Clermont in 1665 and 1666, a few years after Pascal’s death. In these Memoirs, Fléchier relates an anecdote of a young lady “who was the Sappho of the country,” and greatly beloved by all the beaux esprits of the time. Amongst others, “M. Pascal, who had then acquired so much reputation, and another savant, were continually with this belle savante.” It is difficult ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... 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 ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... love,—why is it that in 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 any ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... 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 wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes; but reasonable creatures.) who, from having received ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... 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
... the epistle of Sappho to Phaon is next considered; but Sappho and Ovid are more the subjects of this disquisition, than Pope. We shall, therefore, pass over it to a piece of more importance, the epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, which may justly be regarded, as one of the works on which the reputation ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Sappho struck the quivering wire, The throbbing breast was all on fire; And when she raised the vocal lay, The captive soul was ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... many men who had the start of you in reading. I do so wish I were now in Cambridge (a very selfish wish, however, as I was not with you in all your troubles and misery), to join in all the glory and happiness, which dangers gone by can give. How we would talk, walk, and entomologise! Sappho should be the best of bitches, and Dash, of dogs: then should be 'peace on earth, good will to men,'—which, by the way, I always think the most perfect description of happiness that words ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... 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 poem upon "Silence," ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... his 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 noise of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... 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 ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... 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
... that there were certain females inhabiting the borders of the Aegean Sea who had a sentimental attachment for one another which was called "Lesbian love," and which carried them to the highest degree of frenzy. The immortal effusions of Sappho contain references to this passion. The solution of this peculiar ardor is found in the fact that some of the females had enlarged clitorides, strong voices, robust figures, and imitated men. Their manner was imperative ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... to daylight shall lift up thy paean, Hill to hill thunder, vale cry back to vale, With wind-notes as of eagles AEschylean, And Sappho singing in ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... PINDAR.—The 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 ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... like to know that I have just been translating some extracts from the Greek Anthology. I send you a few specimens of my work, with a Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I hope you will find something of the Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught a spark of inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian. I have found great delight in this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as when I read from my manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into which ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... form of verse, common to the Greeks and Romans, which has sometimes been imitated—or, rather, which some writers have attempted to imitate—in English, is the line or stanza called Sapphic, from the inventress, Sappho, a Greek poetess. The Sapphic verse, according to Fabricius, Smetius, and all good authorities, has eleven syllables, making "five feet—the first a trochee, the second a spondee, the third a dactyl, and the fourth and fifth trochees." The Sapphic stanza, or what is sometimes ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... strange to say, the statues of some of 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 ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... transformation in the woman at my side. Was this gray-clad, nunlike figure the passionate, sensuous Carmen of Bizet’s masterpiece? Could that calm, pale face, crossed by innumerable lines of suffering, as a spider’s web lies on a flower, blaze and pant with Sappho’s guilty love? ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... has Madame Sand had upon me, after the few gifted women, and many charming women whom I have known—after those daughters of the earth, who like Madame Sand said with Sappho: "Come, Mother of Love, to our delicious banquets, fill our cups with the nectar of roses?" As I have placed myself now in fiction and now in reality, the author of Valentine has made on ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... cities themselves Miletus and Ephesus were the most flourishing, Grecian literature took its rise in the AEolic and Ionic cities of Asia Minor. Homer was probably a native of Smyrna. Lyric poetry flourished in the island of Lesbos, where Sappho and Alcaeus were born. The Ionic cities were also the seats of the earliest schools of Grecian philosophy. Thales, who founded the Ionic school of philosophy, was a native of Miletus. Halicarnassus was one of the most ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... to withstand The color-madness of the land, Counted her life-long losses gain, And made her own her sisters' pain; Or her who, in her greenwood shade, Heard the sharp call that Freedom made, And, answering, struck from Sappho's lyre Of love the Tyrtman carmen's fire Or that young girl,—Domremy's maid Revived a nobler cause to aid,— Shaking from warning finger-tips The doom of her apocalypse; Or her, who world-wide entrance gave To the log-cabin of the slave, Made all his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... enthroned her sovereign lady of me, and of you all, and of this our humane Commonwealth. By golden Venus and her son, by Mars armipotent powerless in such toils, and by Vulcan in chains too cunning for his pincers; by Saints Ovid and Sappho, the Chian, the Mantuan, and the Veronese, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... that among the composers who have appeared during the last twenty-five years, M. Gounod was the most promising one, as showing the greatest combination of sterling science, beauty of idea, freshness of fancy, and individuality. Before a note of 'Sappho' was written, certain sacred Roman Catholic compositions and some exquisite settings of French verse had made it clear to some of the acutest judges and profoundest musicians living, that in him at last something ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... His Sappho, a lyrical drama, is one of the few attempts that have been made to bring amongst us that tuneful trifle, the modern Opera of the Italians. It has been transferred by Mr. Mathias into that language, to ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... this sense that poetry is said to be a kind of painting: It is not the picture of the poet, but of things, and persons imagined by him. He may be in his practice and disposition a philosopher, and yet sometimes speak with the softness of an amorous Sappho. I would not be misunderstood, as if I affected so much gravity as to be ashamed to be thought really in love. On the contrary, I cannot have a good opinion of any man who is not at least ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... adjuvant. For if long locks and general dissoluteness were not an aid and a way to pure thought, why have they been so long his characteristics? If lovers were not necessary for the development of poet, novelist, and actress, why have they always had lovers—Sappho, George Eliot, George Sand, Rachel, Sara? Mrs Kendal nurses children all day and strives to play Rosalind at night. What infatuation, what ridiculous endeavour! To realise the beautiful woodland passion and the idea of the transformation, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 of the Republic," it is still ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... half-petrified section of icing-cake on a sooty plate. At the other end of the room were two rickety card-tables and a stand of bookshelves where were displayed under dust four or five small volumes of M. Guy de Maupassant's stories, "Robinson Crusoe," "Sappho," "Mr. Barnes of New York," a work by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Bible, "The Arabian Nights' Entertainment," "Studies of the Human Form Divine," "The Little Minister," and a clutter of monthly magazines and illustrated weeklies of about that crispness one finds in such articles upon a doctor's ante-room ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... 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." These we know to have been ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... include one of Iliad VI., with critical signs and interesting textual notes. Sappho, Euripides (Andromache, "Archelaus," and "Medea"), Antiphanes, Thucydides, Plato ("Gorgias" and "Republic"), AEschines, Demosthenes, and Xenophon are also represented. Among the theological texts are fragments of the lost Greek original of the "Apocalypse of Baruch" and ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... 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 his darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a league he hears the roar Of the Symplegades; And through the far foam of its shore The Isle of Sappho sees. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... 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 time, be ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... said that in comparison with thriving he starved. During this night he hummed airs in bed, thought he would do for the ballad of the fair poetess what other musicians had done for the ballads of other fair poetesses, and dreamed that she smiled on him as her prototype Sappho smiled on Phaon. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... plan was defeated by his having a still stronger mob. After dinner they discussed women's works: few chefs-d'oeuvres; Madame de Sevigne the best; the only three of a high class are Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, and (Bobus Smith said) Sappho, but of her not above forty lines are extant: these, however, are unrivalled; Mrs Somerville is very great in the exact sciences. Lady Holland would not hear of Madame de Stael. They agreed as to Miss Austen that her ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... 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
... painting appear to have remained even more stationary than music. For, while about the middle or latter end of the seventh century, B.C., the names of Archilochus and Terpander adorn the page of musical history, followed by many others, including Alcaeus, Sappho, and Simonides, down to Pindar and his rival Corinna, the former of whom, according to the chronology of Dr Blair, died in 435 B.C. aged 86, it is evident, says Flaxman, "that sculpture was 800 years, from Daedalus to the time ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... mistaken. But, however, we were all disappointed, for the lion lifted up his right paw, which was the fatal sign, and advancing forward, seized her by the arm, and began to tear it: The poor lady gave a terrible shriek, and cried out, 'The lion is just, I am no true virgin! Oh! Sappho, Sappho.' She could say no more, for the lion gave her the coup de grace, by a squeeze in the throat, and she expired at his feet. The keeper dragged away her body to feed the animal when the company was gone, for the parish-lions never used to eat in public. After a little ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift |
