“As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough, the very end of the bough, which the gatherers overlooked, nay overlooked not, but could not reach."[299] It is otherwise in her love-poems, or rather fragments of such, comprising the following: 

     “Now love masters my limbs, and shakes me, fatal
          creature, bitter-sweet.” 
     “Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain
          falling on the oaks.” 
     “Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girl-friend.” 
     “Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am
          by longing for a maiden, at soft Aphrodite’s will.” 
     “For thee there was no other girl, bridegroom, like
          her.”

“Bitter-sweet,” “giver of pain,” “the weaver of fictions,” are some expressions of Sappho’s preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, the rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying “that night might be doubled for her.”  But the most important of her love-poems, and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is the following fragment addressed [Greek:  Pros Gunaika Eromenaen] ("to a beloved woman"): 

“That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in my bosom.  For when I see thee but a little I have no utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead.  But I must dare all, since one so poor ...”

The Platonist Longinus (third century) said that this ode was “not one passion, but a congress of passions,” and declared it the most perfect expression in all ancient literature of the effects of love.  A Greek physician is said to have copied it into his book of diagnoses “as a compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion.”  F.B.  Jevons, in his history of Greek literature (139), speaks of the “marvellous fidelity in her representation of the passion of love.”  Long before him Addison had written in the Spectator (No. 223) that Sappho “felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms.”  Theodore Watts wrote:  “Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers.”  That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne, speaks of the

“dignity of divinity, which informs the most passionate and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with such grandeur as would seem impossible to such passion.”

And J.A.  Symonds assures us that “Nowhere, except, perhaps, in some Persian or Provencal love-songs, can be found more ardent expressions of overmastering passion.”