“The fair-haired Lesbian,” so famed as the poet of nature and passion, was not without a wise philosophy of life, and she assumes the rôle of mentor with pitiless candor. “He who is fair to look upon is good, and he who is good will soon be fair,” is her motto; but she tells Mnasidica that her “gloomy temper spoils her, though she has a more beautiful form than the tender Gyrinna.” Her house is devoted to the service of the Muses and must be cheerful, but she shuts out of an honorable immortality those who prefer worldly fortune to the pleasures of the intellect. To a rich woman without education she says: “Where thou diest there wilt thou lie, and no one will remember thy name in times to come, because thou hast no share in the roses of Pieria. Inglorious wilt thou wander about in Hades and flit among its dark shades.” She does not forget the finer graces of character, and evidently realizes the insidious fascination of material things. A moralist of to-day might be expected to tell us that “wealth without virtue is a dangerous guest,” but we are not apt to credit the gifted singers of the ancient world with so much ethical insight, least of all the women of a sensuous and passionate race, which loved before all things beauty and the pleasures of life. These few touches of wisdom, satire, and criticism, relieved by the love of Sappho for the friends and pupils to whom she is a model, an adviser, and an inspiration, throw a passing side-light on a group of clever women who flit like phantoms across the pages of history, most of them names and nothing more. They are of interest in showing us that the women of ages ago had the same aspirations that we have to-day, together with the same faults, the same virtues, and the same griefs, though they had not learned to moralize their sensations or intellectualize their passions. They show us, too, another phase of the elusive being who dazzled the world in its youth, leaving a few records traced in flame, and charged with an ever-baffling secret for all coming generations. “Men, I think, will remember us hereafter,” she says with subtle foresight, a line that Swinburne has so gracefully expanded in words taken in part from her own lips: I, Sappho, shall be one with all these things, With all high things forever; and my face Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place, Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof With gladness and much sadness and long love. III