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Nature is a wise mother, and she bestows on us no member of the body that is unnecessary. The thought of her fostering care was well expressed by the old Greeks who lived an out-door life, in their personification of Mother Earth under the creation of their Demeter, perfect in form and beautiful in expression and noble in action.
After welcoming his advent at the same time as that of Demeter, the poet addresses him thus: "Other gods are either far away, or they have no ears, or they exist not, or have no care for us. But we see thee, a present deity, not of wood or stone, but real; therefore we pray to thee."
Others had previously reproached him, as the King had just done, with having, in the Demeter, become faithless to his artistic past. How false and foolish this was! Many a remark from the critics would have been better suited to Myrtilus's work than to his. Yet his fear in Tennis had not been true. Only Daphne's sweet face did not suit his more vigorous method of emphasizing distinctions.
She wears a blue gown now, not a white one. Demeter, the sad, bountiful Mother she will be yet the same woman, the sweet and grave, the inflexible, the eternal. And, standing as she has always stood, she wants me, and I must go to her. "I remember the wonder, I remember the morning glory of her first appearing. The spell of the woods was upon her.
The Egyptians call it Athyr, the Athenians Pyanepsion, the Boeotians the month of Demeter. . . . For it was that time of year when they saw some of the fruits vanishing and failing from the trees, while they sowed others grudgingly and with difficulty, scraping the earth with their hands and huddling it up again, on the uncertain chance that what they deposited in the ground would ever ripen and come to maturity.
The character of Hera was what the poets supposed should be the attributes of the Queen of heaven; that of Leto, what should distinguish a disinterested housewife; that of Hestia, what should mark the guardian of the fireside; that of Demeter, what should show supreme benevolence and thrift; that of Athene, what would naturally be associated with wisdom, and that of Aphrodite, what would be expected from a sensual beauty.
His name means 'He of appeasement', and he is nothing else. He is merely the personified shadow or dream generated by the emotion of the ritual very much, to take a familiar instance, as Father Christmas is a 'projection' of our Christmas customs. The Thesmophoria formed the great festival of Demeter and her daughter Korê, though here again Demeter appears with a clinging epithet, Thesmophoros.
However, the priests weave a robe completely on the very day of the feast, and forthwith they bind up the eyes of one of them with a fillet, and having led him with the robe to the way by which one goes to the temple of Demeter, they depart back again themselves.
She had never seen such a statue, and drew back dazzled. What a master was the man who had deceived her trusting heart! He had created a Demeter; the wheat in her hand showed it. How beautiful this work was and how valuable! It produced a powerful impression upon her mind, wholly unaccustomed to the estimate of such things.
Far from the ruins above the sea, beneath the scorched seaward wall of rock: far from the aromatic fragrance of the rock-nourished flowers, from the bees, and the playful lizards, Demeter now occupies her place in the great halls of the British Museum. Like the Hymn, this melancholy and tender work of art is imperfect, but the sentiment is thereby rather increased than impaired.
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