time grow through our veins?

Poetry, we are to believe, arises from the yearning to render eternal
the fleeting moment of passion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says,
[Footnote: In _On the Cliffs_.] "life everlasting of eternal fire."
In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, she exults in her power to
immortalize her passion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea:

Her ways are birth, fecundity and death,
But mine are beauty and immortal love.
Therefore I will be tyrant of myself--
Mine own law will I be! And I will make
Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms
Are wrought of loveliness without decay,
And wild desire without satiety,
And joy and aspiration without death.
And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho!
Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos,
Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens
Are fallen and withered.

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 b