Page:Sappho and the Vigil of Venus (1920).djvu/19

Rh daughters of that island had won an evil pre-eminence of wantonness; then coarse-minded comic writers, for whom pure love between persons of the same sex—as of David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Tennyson and Arthur Hallam—was inconceivable, attributed their own foul imaginings to those fair and sweet women of a golden age. They cast the filth gendered in their own souls upon the robes of Sappho—these wallowers in foulness who thought that they could defile the stars with bespatterings from their sties!