The intensity of passion reaches its climax in the ode to Anactoria. Simple as it is, the vocabulary of “bitter-sweet” emotion is exhausted. In her most impassioned verses, our own Mrs. Browning does not quite forget to reflect about her love. She sets it forth in subtly woven thoughts, and lets it filter through her mind until it takes the color of it. Sappho sings of passion pure and artless. She does not think about it, she does not analyze it. It possesses her heart and imagination, and she tells it so simply, so sincerely, and so truly, that the familiar story never loses its charm. She sang in the childhood of the world, when people felt more than they thought, when love was a sensation, a joy, a passion, a pain, not a sentiment. If she did not spiritualize her theme, she purified it of the coarseness which made the love-songs of men, before and afterward, unfit for a delicate ear. This first touch of a woman in literature was to refine it, though it was many centuries before she had the power to lead men to take love from the exclusive domain of the senses and give it a soul. II But it is not alone as a singer that Sappho has come down to us. She was the leader of an intellectual movement among women that was without a parallel in classic times. We may greet her as not only the first of woman poets, but as the founder of the first “woman’s club” known to us. It is not certain that it had either a constitution or by-laws, and it discussed poetry and esthetics instead of science and social economics. But the measure of the intellect is not so much what we discuss as the quality of thought we bring into the discussion. It is easy enough to talk platitudes about literature or philosophy, and not so easy as one might imagine to talk wisely and well about poetry, or manners, or the art of living; and it is easier to do any of these things than it is to write what is worth talking about. The women who came to Sappho from the isles of the Ægean and the far hills of Greece seem to have been more intent upon writing poems than talking about them. There is no trace of brilliant conversation, or critical papers, or gathered sheaves of the knowledge that comes so freely under our own hand. Unfortunately, there was no secretary in this primitive club to take notes for posterity, or, if there was, the records have been lost. We know little of its sayings, though there are scattered traces of its doings. A few faint echoes have come to us across the centuries,--a verse, a line, a trait, a word, a heart-cry,--and that is all. Even these give us glimpses of its personal rather than of its intellectual side. Of the quality of its work we cannot judge, as there is little of it left. That it was thought worthy of praise in its day, with Sappho as a standard, proves at least a high degree of merit. She was musician as well as poet, and trained many of the maidens for singing in sacred festivals, as well as in the arts of poetry and manners.