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Byron alludes to the story of Sappho in "Childe Harold," Canto II.: "Childe Harold sailed and passed the barren spot Where sad Penelope o'erlooked the wave, And onward viewed the mount, not yet forgot, The lover's refuge and the Lesbian's grave. Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save That breast imbued with such immortal fire?
There is a life of him by Sir L. Stephen. Poet and translator, b. near Doncaster, and ed. at Camb., after which he took orders. He translated Anacreon, Sappho, and other classics, modernised parts of the poems of Gavin Douglas, and was the author of the well-known song, The Brown Jug, and of two poems, Bramham Park and Partridge Shooting. It had great popularity in its day.
Bartja and Sappho were delighted to find such a welcome guest, and after she had dandled and played with her great grandchild, the little Parmys, to her heart's content, they led her to the rooms which had been prepared for her. Herod. They were the same in which the unhappy Tachot had spent the last months of her fading existence.
The next morning, as the three friends were walking with their host in his garden, Zopyrus exclaimed: "Wily, Bartja, I've been dreaming all night of your Sappho. What a lucky fellow you are! Why I fancied my new wife in Sardis was no end of a beauty until I saw Sappho, and now when I think of her she seems like an owl.
How near was I seeing the dominions of black Proserpine, and Aeacus sitting in judgment; the separate abodes also of the pious, and Sappho complaining in her Aeohan lyre of her own country damsels; and thee, O Alcaeus, sounding in fuller strains on thy golden harp the distresses of exile, and the distresses of war.
Of the amorous effusions of the lyre, we yet have examples in the odes of Anacreon, and the incomparable ode of Sappho: the lyric strains which animated to battle, have sunk into oblivion; but the victors in the public games of Greece have their fame perpetuated in the admirable productions of Pindar.
The gift of song is sweet, and may be made an instrument of the Creator's glory. The first notes of the lark are feeble, compared to his heaven-high strains. The fainter dawn precedes the risen day." Oh! had he addressed me in indulgent words as these, who knows but that, like burning Sappho, I might have sang as well as loved?
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.
"It's now well known that Sappho was the somewhat lewd invention of Professor Hobkin," Ruth interrupted. "Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that any woman ever has been able to write or ever will be able to write," Eleanor continued. "And yet, whenever I go among authors they never cease to talk to me about their books. Masterly! I say, or Shakespeare himself!
Two months had passed away since Phanes' disappearance, and much had happened. The very day on which he left Egypt, Sappho had given birth to a girl, and had so far regained strength since then under the care of her grandmother, as to be able to join in an excursion up the Nile, which Croesus had suggested should take place on the festival of the goddess Neith.
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