For all my days as all thy days from birth My heart as thy heart was in me as thee Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth Is fuel enough to feed, While day sows night, and night sows day for seed. This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love. The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is needed as a foil to the fiery splendors of passion. Thus Rupert Brooke, in the sonnet, _Mutability_, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal love and beauty, declaring, Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile; Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over; Love has no habitation but the heart: Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, Cling, and are borne into the night apart, The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover. Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love. Her frenzies in _Anactoria_, where, if our hypothesis is correct, Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness, arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries, What had all we done That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins? Poetry, we are to believe, arises from the yearning to render eternal the fleeting moment of passion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says, [Footnote: In _On the Cliffs_.] "life everlasting of eternal fire." In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, she exults in her power to immortalize her passion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea: Her ways are birth, fecundity and death, But mine are beauty and immortal love. Therefore I will be tyrant of myself-- Mine own law will I be! And I will make Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms Are wrought of loveliness without decay, And wild desire without satiety, And joy and aspiration without death. And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho! Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos, Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens Are fallen and withered.