sing this custom,
There are, however, more impenetrable veils than those outwardly put
on. When we compare the simplicity of the primitive ages of the East
with the guileful art and hardened worldliness of the fashionable
society of the West, we are tempted to think, that the more woman has
bared her face, the more she has masked her mind.

Truth requires us to qualify the view of the social condition of
women which we derive from the comic poets, from the later Greek
writers in general, and from the biting epigrams on women preserved
in the Greek Anthology. That qualification may be drawn from the
history of Sappho. The consenting conclusions of the best critical
scholars of recent times--as may be seen in such works as Smith's
"Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography" and Miller's "Literature of
Ancient Greece,"--have cleared her name from the foul aspersions
thrown on it by the authors of a subsequent age, who interpreted her
life and works by the unclean standards of their own. "Not a line in
her fragments, rightly understood, can cast a cloud on her fair
fame." In her time, sensual and sentimental love were not distinctly
separated; and she expressed her passionate but pure sentiments with
a simple freedom and fervor afterwards grossly misconceived. It is to
a friend of her own sex that Sappho writes, "Equal to the gods seems
to me the man who sits opposite to thee, and watches thy sweet mouth
and charming smile. While I look at thee, my heart loses its force,
my tongue ceases to speak, a subtile fire glides through my veins,
and a rushing sound fills my ears." This mixture of feelings, this
carrying on of friendships between men, or between women, in the
language of passionate love, without the implication of any thing
corrupt, was a feature of the Greek character, unknown to nations of
a poorer and colder temperament. It seems, as is set forth by Miller,
in the fourth book of his "Dorians," that, in Lesbos, and some other
parts of Greece, female societies were formed, each under the lead of
some woman of distinguished genius, for the cultivation of poesy,
music, refinement and grace of manners, and the other elegant arts.
Girls were sent from distant cities, and even from foreign lands, to
be educated in these societies. Sappho was the head of one of them.
She calls her house, "The House of the Servant of the Muses." She
formed ardent friendships with many of her pupils. It is these
friendships which she celebra