Whatever her character and personal history may have been, we know that she wrote perfect lyrics with the spark of immortality in them, and gathered about her in the sunny island of Lesbos a circle of educated women who devoted themselves to the study of music, poetry, and the arts of refined living. Her genius has been recognized by poets, philosophers, and critics, as well as by simpler people who felt in her verse the “touch of nature” that “makes the whole world kin.” She was the “divine Muse” of Plato, and shared the lyric throne with Pindar. Aristotle quoted her, and the austere Solon was so charmed with one of her odes that he said he could not die until he had learned it. Strabo writes that “at no period on record has any woman been known who compared with her in the least degree as a poet.” Horace and Catullus imitated her, Ovid paraphrased her, but no one has caught the essence of her fiery spirit. Plutarch likens her to the “heart of a volcano.” Longinus called her celebrated ode, “not a passion, but a congress of passions.” Modern men have tried to put her golden-winged, fire-tipped words into another tongue, and turned with despair from the task. It is like trying to seize the light that blazes in the heart of the diamond, or the fiery tints that hide in the opal. Perhaps Swinburne has best caught the spirit and the music of Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven, Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity. But even this exquisite artist in words says: “Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed.” There were nine volumes of her works in the days of Horace. To-day scarcely more than two hundred lines survive. Besides the two immortal odes, we have only fragments, gems scattered here and there through the writers of antiquity. To the everlasting discredit of an ignorant and fanatical age, the fathers denounced her, and the Byzantine emperors or the ascetic monks of a later time burned these so-called relics of paganism, to supply their place with books of devotion and lives of the saints. When the Hellenic spirit woke again, after a sleep of more than a thousand years, it was too late. These poems had perished with many monumental works of the intellect, and scholars thought their lives well spent if they found a line or two from the lost treasures.