whom you have given your whole heart,—­to whom in your great love you look up as so much higher than yourself—­you cannot prove the steadfastness and faithfulness of that love better, than by raising and improving your mind to the utmost of your power.  Every good and beautiful truth that you learn is an offering to him you love best, for in giving your whole self, you give your virtues too.  But no one gains this victory in dreams.  The dew by which such blossoms are nourished is called the sweat of man’s brow.’  So she would speak to me, and then I started up ashamed and left the hearth, and either took my lyre to learn new songs, or listened to my loving teacher’s words—­she is wiser than most men—­attentively and still.  And so the time passed on; a rapid stream, just like our river Nile, which flows unceasingly, and brings such changing scenes upon its waves, sometimes a golden boat with streamers gay,—­sometimes a fearful, ravenous crocodile.”

“But now we are sitting in the golden boat.  Oh, if time’s waves would only cease to flow!  If this one moment could but last for aye.  You lovely girl, how perfectly you speak, how well you understand and remember all this beautiful teaching and make it even more beautiful by your way of repeating it.  Yes, Sappho, I am very proud of you.  In you I have a treasure which makes me richer than my brother, though half the world belongs to him.”

“You proud of me? you, a king’s son, the best and handsomest of your family?”

“The greatest worth that I can find in myself is, that you think me worthy of your love.”

“Tell me, ye gods, how can this little heart hold so much joy without breaking?  ’Tis like a vase that’s overfilled with purest, heaviest gold?”

“Another heart will help you to bear it; and that is my own, for mine is again supported by yours, and with that help I can laugh at every evil that the world or night may bring.”

“Oh, don’t excite the envy of the gods; human happiness often vexes them.  Since you left us we have passed some very, very sad days.  The two poor children of our kind Phanes—­a boy as beautiful as Eros, and a little girl as fair and rosy as a summer morning’s cloud just lit up by the sun,—­came for some happy days to stay with us.  Grandmother grew quite glad and young again while looking on these little ones, and as for me I gave them all my heart, though really it is your’s and your’s alone.  But hearts, you know, are wonderfully made; they’re like the sun who sends his rays everywhere, and loses neither warmth nor light by giving much, but gives to all their due.  I loved those little ones so very much.  One evening we were sitting quite alone with Theopompus in the women’s room, when suddenly we heard aloud, wild noise.  The good old Knakias, our faithful slave, just reached the door as all the bolts gave way, and, rushing through the entrance-hall into the peristyle, the andronitis, and so on to us, crashing the door between, came a