ted
certain simple rites, the half-understood local observance and
the half-believed local legend reacting capriciously on each
other. They leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel of meat at
the crossroads to take on her journey; and perhaps some real
Demeter carries them away, as she wanders through the country.
The incidents of their yearly labour become to them acts of
worship; they seek her blessing through many expressive names,
and almost catch sight of her at dawn or evening, in the nooks of
the fragrant fields. She lays a finger on the grass at the
roadside, and some new flower comes up. All the picturesque
implements of country life are hers; the poppy also, emblem of an
exhaustless fertility, and full of mysterious juices for the
alleviation of pain. The country-woman who puts her child to
sleep in the great, cradle-like basket for winnowing the corn
remembers Demeter _Kourotrophos_, the mother of corn and
children alike, and makes it a little coat out of the dress worn
by its father at his initiation into her mysteries.... She lies
on the ground out-of-doors on summer nights, and becomes wet with
the dew. She grows young again every spring, yet is of great age,
the wrinkled woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse of
Demophoon."

This bit of description moves with so light a foot that one forgets,
as true art always makes one forget, the mass of hard and scattered
materials which lie back of it, materials which would not have yielded
their secret of unity and vitality save to imagination and sympathy;
to knowledge which has ripened into culture. But the recovery of such
a story, the reconstruction of such a figure, are not affected by
description alone; one must penetrate to the heart of the myth, and
master the significance of the woman transformed by idealisation into
a beneficent and much labouring goddess. We must go with Mr. Pater a
step farther if we would understand how a man of culture divines the
deeper experiences of an alien race:--

"Three profound ethical conceptions, three impressive sacred
figures, have now defined themselves for the Greek imagination,
condensed from all the traditions which have now been traced,
from the hymns of the poets, from the instinctive and
unformulated mysticism of primitive minds. Demeter is become the
divine, sorrowing mother. Kore, the goddess of summer, is become
Persephone, the goddess of deat