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torches at the fires of Mount Etna that she might search the world through the night. Neither gods nor men could, or dared, tell her of Proserpine's fate. Nine days she wandered, and at last, returning to Sicily, she learned the truth from Arethusa, who had just passed through the nether world in her chaste flight from Alpheus. "There," she said, "I saw your Proserpine. She was sad, but no longer was there terror in her eyes. Her look was such as became the Queen of the realms of the dead."

Drawn in her chariot by two dragons, Ceres flew to the abode of the gods, where she awed even Jove by her storm of prayers

So mighty was the mother's childless cry,

A cry that rang thro' Hades, Earth, and Heaven.

Yielding to her, Jove sent Mercury to demand Proserpine of Pluto, but made it a condition of her release that she should not have tasted food in the lower world. When he arrived and Pluto was about to yield, it appeared that Proserpine, walking in the Elysian fields, had sucked the pulp of a pomegranate. This forbade her surrender, but as a compromise it was decreed that she should evermore spend half of the year with her mother on the earth, and half with her husband below it.

Ceres waited with far-off gaze for her coming, and the meeting of mother and daughter has been the theme of poets from Ovid to Tennyson. It is our own poet who describes their meeting:

A sudden nightingale

Saw thee, and flash'd into a frolic of song
And welcome; and a gleam as of the moon,
When first she peers along the tremulous deep,
Fled wavering o'er thy face, and chased away

That shadow of a likeness to the King

Of Shadows, thy dark mate. Persephone!

Queen of the dead no more-my child! Thine eyes

Again were human-godlike, and the Sun

Burst from a swimming fleece of winter gray,

And robed thee in his day from head to feet—

"Mother!" and I was folded in thine arms.

This is the deathless story. It has but one meaning. Proserpine signifies the seed-corn, which through the winter lies darkly hidden in the soil, and her yearly return is the symbol of the spring.

So in the pleasant vale we stand again,
The field of Enna, now once more ablaze
With flowers that brighten as thy footstep falls.

Nothing that man knows is so interesting to him, or so fraught with the mystery which enlarges without weighing him down, as the change of the seasons. Still, in his poetry and imagination, Ceres and Proserpine walk together hand-in-hand, and once more they lead us, through the lights of spring, to the pomp which is roses, and the wealth which is corn, and the sweetness which is honey in the honeycomb.

Such, in meagre outline, is that world of myth which shimmers for ever behind "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." Much of it is crude, or even repellent, but what is beautiful and what is forbidding belongs alike to the childhood of man. Ruskin says: "To the mean person the myth means little; to the noble person much." The poet, the artist, and the dreamer will return to these stories so long as men feel the burden and the mystery of life, and are fain to lose them in "the light that never was on sea or land."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ovid: Metamorphores.

Lemprière: A Classical Dictionary.

The early chapters of George Grobe's History of Greece give remarkable summaries of Greek myth.

Thomas Bulfinch: The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology.

Charles Mills Gayley: The Classic Myths in English Literature. This work is based on Bulfinch's Age of Fable, but is supplied with a large body of valuable notes on interpretations of the myths by scholars and the use made of them by poets, painters, and sculptors.

E. M. Berens: The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, being a Popular Account of Greek and Roman Mythology.

Grace H. Kupfer: Legends of Greece and Rome. This is a charming book for children.

Lillian Stoughton Hyde: Favourite Greek Myths. Also for children.

T. G. Tucker, Litt. D.: The Foreign Debt of English Literature. H. A. Guerber: The Myths of Greece and Rome: their Stories, Signification, and Origin.

H. Steuding: Greek and Roman Mythology.

There are in inexpensive editions: an abridgement of William Smith's Classical Dictionary; also The Muses' Pageant Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece, retold by W. M. L. Hutchinson. Vol. I, Myths of the Gods; Vol. II, Myths of the Heroes; Vol. III, The Legends of Thebes.

VII

GREECE AND ROME

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