How should they know that Sappho lived and died Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover, Never transfused and lost in what she loved, Never so wholly loving nor at peace. I asked for something greater than I found, And every time that love has made me weep I have rejoiced that love could be so strong; For I have stood apart and watched my soul Caught in a gust of passion as a bird With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind Struggles and frees itself to find the sky. She continues, apostrophizing beauty, In many guises didst thou come to me; I saw thee by the maidens when they danced, Phaon allured me with a look of thine, In Anactoria I knew thy grace. I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes, But never wholly, soul and body mine Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as for the insatiability of the poet's love. If the poet's genius consists of his peculiar capacity for love, then in proportion as he outsoars the rest of humanity he will be saddened, if not disillusioned, by the half-hearted return of his love. Mrs. Browning characterizes her passion: I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal grace. It is clear that a lesser soul could not possibly give an adequate response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment. [Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's passion is the theme of Alice Meynell's _The Poet and his Wife_. On the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, _Anne Hathaway's Cottage_ (1914); C. J. Druce, _The Dark Lady to Shakespeare_ (1919); Karle Wilson Baker, _Keats and Fanny Brawne_ (1919); James B. Kenyon, _Phaon concerning Sappho_ (1920).] Since the poet's soul is more beautiful than the souls of other men, it follows that he cannot love at all except, in a sense, by virtue of the fact that he is easily deceived. Here is another explanation of the transience of his affections,--in his horrified recoil from an unworthy object that he has idealized. This blindness to sensuality is accounted for by Plato in the figure, "The lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 255.] [Footnote: Browning shows the poet, with his eyes open, loving an unworthy form, in _Time's Revenges_.] This is the figure used in Sara Teasdale's little poem, _The Star_, which says to the pool,