—His singing-mistress verily was no other Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother Of all the tribe that feel in melodies; Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep Into the rambling world-encircling deep Which hides her where none sees. And one can hold in thought that nightly here His phantom may draw down to the water’s brim, And hers come up to meet it, as a dim Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere, And mariners wonder as they traverse near, Unknowing of her and him. One dreams him sighing to her spectral form: “O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line; Where are those songs, O poetess divine Whose very arts are love incarnadine?” And her smile back: “Disciple true and warm, Sufficient now are thine.” ... (THOMAS HARDY, _A Singer Asleep_) While perhaps Swinburne exaggerates in his praise of Sappho, he owes much to the great poetess of love: Love’s priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, Song’s priestess, mad with joy and pain of love. (_On the Cliffs_) He makes her say: My blood was hot wan wine of love, And my song’s sound the sound thereof, The sound of the delight of it. In _Tristram of Lyonesse_ he speaks of “Sweet Love, that art so bitter,” and in _Anactoria_: My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes Blind me, thy tresses burn me ... His poems have many Sapphic echoes. In his youth he poured several of Sappho’s fragments into the melting pot of _Anactoria_, where she is a nerve-racked woman, torn by passion, sensuous and lascivious, altogether too “Sapphic.” The rhetoric in his lines is gorgeous, but he loses much of Sappho’s emotional power. “That one low, pellucid phrase,” as Mackail calls the line, “I say that one will think of us even hereafter,” is expanded into: Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine Except these kisses of my lips on thine Brand them with immortality; but me— Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea, Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold Cast forth of heaven with feet of awful gold And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind, Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown— But in the light and laughter, in the moan And music, and in grasp of lip and hand And shudder of water that makes felt on land The immeasurable tremor of all the sea, Memories shall mix and metaphors of me. The famous fragment of four lines which we have quoted above (p. 69) becomes: