Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[324] there can be no objection, except that under it any one of us might be convicted of having died last year, on the plea that his death was a fact too notorious to be mentioned in the newspapers.

But whether by the way of the Leucadian cliff or otherwise, Sappho is gone, with her music and her pupils and most of the words she wrote, and the very city where she dwelt, and all but the island she loved. It is something to be able to record that, twenty-five centuries ago, in that remote nook among the Grecian Isles, a woman's genius could play such a part in moulding the great literature that has moulded the world. Colonel Mure thinks that a hundred such women might have demoralized all Greece. But it grew demoralized at any rate; and even the island where Sappho taught took its share in the degradation. If, on the other hand, the view taken of her by more careful criticism be correct, a hundred such women might have done much to save it. Modern nations must take up again the problem where Athens failed and Lesbos only pointed the way to the solution,--to create a civilization where the highest culture shall be extended to woman also. It is not enough that we should dream, with Plato, of a republic where man is free and woman but a serf. The aspirations of modern life culminate, like the greatest of modern poems, in the elevation of womanhood. Die ewige Weibliche zieht uns hinan.