Ovid appropriates the kiss most effectively in his passages descriptive of the endearments, the fascinations, the yearnings, and the transports of love. Briseis in her letter to Achilles, begging him to return to the Grecian camp, is made to say: “Oh that the Greeks would send me hence to try If I could make your stubborn heart comply! Few words I’d use; all should be sighs, and tears, And looks, and kisses, mixed with hopes and fears; My love like lightning through my eyes should fly, And thaw the ice which round your heart does lie; Sometimes my arms about your neck I’d throw; And then embrace your knees and humbly bow. There is more eloquence in tears and kisses Than in the smooth harangues of sly Ulysses.”[2] In the letter of Sappho to her lover, Phaon, when he had forsaken her, and she had resolved upon suicide, we have a picture of that “sorrow’s crown of sorrow,” the remembrance in adversity of happier days: “Yet once your Sappho could your cares employ, Once in her arms you centred all your joy; Still all those joys to my remembrance move, For, oh, how vast a memory has love! My music then you could forever hear, And all my words were music to your ear; You stopped with kisses my enchanting tongue, And found my kisses sweeter than my song. The fair Sicilians now your soul inflame: Why was I born, ye gods, a Lesbian dame?” A wife’s affection is shown in the letter of Laodanna to her husband at Aulis with the Grecian fleet: “Yet while before the leaguer thou dost lie, Thy picture is some pleasure to my eye; There must be something in it more than art, ’Twere very thee, could it thy mind impart: I kiss the pretty idol, and complain, As if (like thee) ’twould answer me again.” This pretty conceit, which the moderns have often copied from Ovid, occurs in the epistle of Paris to Helen: “If you your young Hermione but kiss, Straight from her lips I snatch the envied bliss.” In his “Art of Love” (Book I.) Ovid thus pursues his course of instruction: