ich this exquisite elegy is founded; yet we
venture to do so rather than that the forgetfulness of the reader should
militate against his enjoyment of the poem. Proserpine, according to the
Homeride (for the story is not without variations), when gathering
flowers with the Ocean-Nymphs, is carried off by Aidoneus, or Pluto. Her
mother, Ceres, wanders over the earth for her in vain, and refuses to
return to heaven till her daughter is restored to her. Finally, Jupiter
commissions Hermes to persuade Pluto to render up his bride, who rejoins
Ceres at Eleusis. Unfortunately she has swallowed a pomegranate seed in
the Shades below, and is thus mysteriously doomed to spend one-third of
the year with her husband in Hades, though for the remainder of the year
she is permitted to dwell with Ceres and the gods. This is one of the
very few mythological fables of Greece which can be safely interpreted
into an allegory. Proserpine denotes the seed-corn one-third of the year
below the earth; two-thirds (that is, dating from the appearance of the
ear) above it. Schiller has treated this story with admirable and
artistic beauty; and, by an alteration in its symbolical character has
preserved the pathos of the external narrative, and heightened the beauty
of the interior meaning--associating the productive principle of the
earth with the immortality of the soul. Proserpine here is not the
symbol of the buried seed, but the buried seed is the symbol of her--that
is, of the dead. The exquisite feeling of this poem consoled Schiller's
friend, Sophia La Roche, in her grief for her son's death.
[30] What a beautiful vindication of the shortness of human life!

[31] The corn-flower.

[32] For this story, see Herodotus, book iii, sections 40-43.

[33] President of Council of Five Hundred.

[34] We have already seen in "The Ring of Polycrates," Schiller's mode
of dealing with classical subjects. In the poems that follow, derived
from similar sources, the same spirit is maintained. In spite of
Humboldt, we venture to think that Schiller certainly does not narrate
Greek legends in the spirit of an ancient Greek. The Gothic sentiment,
in its ethical depth and mournful tenderness, more or less pervades all
that he translates from classic fable into modern pathos. The grief of
Hero in the ballad subjoined, touches closely on the lamentations of
Thekla, in "Wallenstein." The Complaint of Ceres, embodies Christian
grief and Christi