eep may make a
lover "paler than grass"; that his heart is apt to "flutter in his
bosom," and his tongue to be embarrassed in presence of the beloved;
but when Sappho speaks of a lover bathed in sweat, of becoming blind,
deaf, and dumb, trembling all over, and little better than one dead,
she indulges in exaggeration which is neither true to life nor poetic.

An amusing experiment may be made with reference to this famous poem.
Suppose you say to a friend:

"A woman was walking in the woods when she saw
something that made her turn pale as a sheet; her heart
fluttered, her ears rang, her tongue was paralyzed, a
cold sweat covered her, she trembled all over and
looked as if she would faint and die: what did she
see?"

The chances are ten to one that your friend will answer "a bear!" In
truth, Sappho's famous "symptoms of love" are laughably like the
symptoms of fear which we find described in the books of Bain, Darwin,
Mosso, and others--"a cold sweat," "deadly pallor," "voice becoming
husky or failing altogether," "heart beating violently," "dizziness
which will blind him," "trembling of all the muscles of the body," "a
fainting fit." Nor is fear the only emotion that can produce these
symptoms. Almost any strong passion, anger, extreme agony or joy, may
cause them; so that what Sappho described was not love in particular,
but the physiologic effects of violent emotions in general. I am glad
that the Greek physician who copied her poem into his book of
diagnoses is not my family doctor.

Sappho's love-poems are not psychologic but purely physiologic. Of the
imaginative, sentimental, esthetic, moral, altruistic, sympathetic,
affectional symptoms of what we know as romantic love they do not give
us the faintest hint. Hegel remarked truly that "in the odes of Sappho
the language of love rises indeed to the point of lyrical inspiration,
yet what she reveals is rather the slow consuming flame of the blood
than the inwardness of the subjective heart and soul." Nor was Byron
deceived: "I don't think Sappho's ode a good example." The historian
Bender had an inkling of the truth when he wrote (183):

"To us who are accustomed to spiritualized love-lyrics after
the style of Geibel's this erotic song of Sappho may seem
too glowing, too violent; but we must not forget that love
was conceived by the Greeks altogether in a less spiritual
manner than we demand that it shoul