United States or Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The freshness of the air, the beauty and picturesque situations of the houses surrounded by lofty and fine trees, the over-teeming fertility of the soil, and the laughing fields, where golden Ceres still lingers, unwilling to quit her favourite abode, intersected by courses of lava, as yet unproductive, make this view one of the most beautiful and interesting that can be imagined.
As Ceres herself could not approach Famine, for the Fates have ordained that these two goddesses shall never come together, she called an Oread from her mountain and spoke to her in these words: "There is a place in the farthest part of ice-clad Scythia, a sad and sterile region without trees and without crops. Cold dwells there, and Fear, and Shuddering, and Famine.
It is important however to observe that this breakdown occurred because of excess of religious zeal rather than through neglect and indifference, and though we may indeed notice a gradual deterioration of the deities introduced by the books, all the way down from the busy working gods like Ceres and Mercury and Neptune to the more miraculous Aesculapius, and the cult of Dis or Proserpina with its possibilities of weird fantastic worship, there have been however as yet only scanty traces of the orgiastic element.
And there stands the giant to this day; or, at any rate, there stands a mountain as tall as he, and which bears his name; and when the thunder rumbles about its summit, we may imagine it to be the voice of Giant Atlas, bellowing after Hercules! Mother Ceres was exceedingly fond of her daughter Proserpina, and seldom let her go alone into the fields.
And when they saw only a sad and anxious woman, with a torch in her hand and a wreath of withered poppies on her head, they spoke rudely, and sometimes threatened to set the dogs upon her. But nobody had seen Proserpina, nor could give Mother Ceres the least hint which way to seek her.
And since the flowers, the special care of Ceres's daughter, disappeared at the same time, it seemed most likely that it was this daughter who had disappeared, stolen and held captive underground. When, each year, the time of her captivity was at an end, Ceres went joyfully back to her work, the flowers and grass once more appeared in a word, it was spring.
That, however, is neither here nor there. Who wants you to be different? Aurora, if you only knew yourself! Ceres, or Summer, or Peace sitting among the wheat-sheaves, what would it matter that she had not been educated at a fashionable boarding-school?
"Will not you stay a moment," asked Phoebus, "and hear me turn the pretty and touching story of Proserpina into extemporary verses?" But Ceres shook her head, and hastened away, along with Hecate. But when a poet gets into the habit of using his heartstrings to make chords for his lyre, he may thrum upon them as much as he will, without any great pain to himself.
Of all the farinacea, corn is best adapted to the condition of a pioneer people; and if idolatry is at all justifiable, Ceres, or certainly the Goddess of Indian corn, should have had a temple and a worshipers among the pioneers of Tennessee. Without that grain, the frontier settlements could not have been formed and maintained.
The river-nymph would have told the goddess all she had witnessed, but dared not, for fear of Pluto; so she only ventured to take up the girdle which Proserpine had dropped in her flight, and waft it to the feet of the mother. Ceres, seeing this, was no longer in doubt of her loss, but she did not yet know the cause, and laid the blame on the innocent land.
Word Of The Day