To one who craves an absolute aesthetic standard, it is satisfactory to note how nearly unanimous our poets are in their portrayal of Sappho. [Footnote: No doubt they are influenced by the glimpse of her given in Longinus, _On the Sublime_.] This is the more remarkable, since our enormous ignorance of her life and poetry would give almost free scope to inventive faculty. It is significant that none of our writers have been attracted to the picture Welcker gives of her as the respectable matronly head of a girl's seminary. Instead, she is invariably shown as mad with an insatiable yearning, tortured by the conviction that her love can never be satisfied. Charles Kingsley, describing her temperament, Night and day A mighty hunger yearned within her heart, And all her veins ran fever, [Footnote: _Sappho_.] conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her, Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love. [Footnote: _On the Cliffs_.] It is in this insatiability that Swinburne finds the secret of her genius, as opposed to the meager desires of ordinary folk. Expressing her conception of God, he makes Sappho assert, But having made me, me he shall not slay: Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his, Who laugh and love a little, and their kiss Contents them. It is, no doubt, an inarticulate conviction that she is "imprisoned in the body as in an oyster shell," [Footnote: Plato, _Phaedrus_, Sec. 250.] while the force that is wooing her is outside the boundary of the senses, that accounts for Sappho's agonies of despair. In Sara Teasdale's _Sappho_ she describes herself, Who would run at dusk Along the surges creeping up the shore When tides come in to ease the hungry beach, And running, running till the night was black, Would fall forspent upon the chilly sand, And quiver with the winds from off the sea. Ah! quietly the shingle waits the tides Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest. [Footnote: In the end, Sara Teasdale does show her winning content, in the love of her baby daughter, but it is significant that this destroys her lyric gift. She assures Aphrodite, If I sing no more To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God, It is that thou hast made my life too sweet To hold the added sweetness of a song. * * * * * I taught the world thy music; now alone I sing for her who falls asleep to hear.] Swinburne characteristically shows her literally tearing the flesh in her quest of the divinity that is reflected there. In _Anactoria_ she tells the object of her infatuation: I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead. * * * * * I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, Intense device and superflux of pain.