facts in vital relations to each other,
to see them in true prospective. And the difficulties are immensely
increased when the period is not only remote, but deficient in
definite registry of thought and feeling; when the record of what it
believed and felt does not exist by itself, but must be deciphered
from those works of art in which is preserved the final form of
thought and feeling, and in which are gathered and merged a great mass
of ideas and emotions.

This is especially true of the more subtle and elusive Greek myths,
which were in no case creations of the individual imagination or of
definite periods of time, but which were fed by many tributaries, very
slowly taking shape out of general but shadowy impressions, widely
diffused but vague ideas, deeply felt but obscure emotions. To get at
the heart of one of these stories one must be able not only to enter
into the thought of the unknown poets who made their contributions to
the myth, but must also be able to disentangle the threads of idea and
feeling so deftly woven together, and follow each back to its shadowy
beginning. To do this, one must have not only knowledge, but sympathy
and imagination,--those closely related qualities which get at the
soul of knowledge and make it live again; those qualities which the
man of culture shares in no small measure with the man of genius. In
his studies of such myths as those which gather about Dionysus and
Demeter this is precisely what Mr. Pater did. He not only marked out
distinctly the courses of the main streams, but he followed back the
rivulets to their fountain-heads; he not only mastered the thought of
an extinct people, but, what is much more difficult, he put off his
knowledge and put on their ignorance; he not only entered into their
thought about the world of nature which surrounded them, but he
entered into their feeling about it. Very lightly touched and charming
is, for instance, his description of the habits and haunts and worship
of Demeter, the current impressions of her service and place in the
life of the world:--

"Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when the young lambs are
dropped; she visits the barns in autumn; she takes part in mowing
and binding up the corn, and is the goddess of sheaves. She
presides over the pleasant, significant details of the farm, the
threshing-floor, and the full granary, and stands beside the
woman baking bread at the oven. With these fancies are connec