ideas, though but half-realised, the figures of our story are the symbols, and what meanings, half-consciously to the narrator, give weight and solemnity to his narrative, let the reader bear in mind thus much only. Ceres, or as we shall call her, Demeter, is an Earth-mother as the word implies. Other and older Earth-mothers were known to Greek cosmology. The oldest of them all was Gaia, the first-born daughter of Chaos, and mother of the Titans. In the generation of the Titans themselves, the earth was represented by Rhea, otherwise called Kybele; but the powers of the earth personified in Rhea, and propitiated in her Phrygian and Kretan rites, were its savage and awful powers. Whereas in the daughter of Rhea, Demeter, another set of powers was personified. She belongs to the generation of the Olympians, the younger gods who rule over civilised mankind; she, also, is a goddess of the earth, but of the earth in arable places, and not of wilderness or mountain; a goddess of the earth's bounty, and not of her solitudes; a goddess of corn and cornlands, of ploughing, sowing, reaping, and the harvest-home. As such, she was worshipped in many a spring and summer festival, variously called Threshing-feasts, feasts of Abundance, and the like. In the minds of the whole Greek race, it was she who had first turned them from savage ways, had given them golden grain instead of acorns, and taught them the use of the plough. And as agriculture is the first step in civilization, so settled family life is the next. The goddess of husbandry becomes by a kindred title the goddess of home; and Demeter, who has taught the man to plough and sow, teaches the man and woman to dwell together under the same roof, beside the same hearth. In this capacity, Demeter is the goddess of marriage laws, and thence of all laws, Demeter Thesmophoros; and as such, from one end of the Greek world to the other, the women held a feast of their own in her honour, the October feast of the Thesmophoria. But her most solemn titles are yet to come. The earth, besides the bounty of its fields, has the mystery of its depths; it includes an invisible as well as a visible world, an under region of death as well as an upper region of life. Hades, or Pluto, was the god whom the ancients thought of as permanently ruling over this invisible world. But there is a kingdom common to both worlds. There are the fruits of the earth, which come up in the spring time, and bloom for a season, and go down in the autumn and are seen no more till the next spring. The things of this kingdom, this bloom and verdure, were naturally thought of as the offspring of the Earth-mother; they were invested with divinity, and the divinity was called the child of Demeter. This child of Demeter is named Persephone; and the story of Persephone carried away by Hades and restored after a season is the story of the green life of the earth, its disappearance and renewal. But why, inquired the Greek imagination, if the green herb disappears and is renewed, may not the life of man, when it has disappeared, be renewed also? We, too, go down into the earth; shall we, too, hope to return again? Out of this play of the imagination arose a kind of faith, shadowy and indeterminate

in its intellectual outlines, but none the less powerful in its hold upon the emotions. Demeter and Persephone were the goddesses and guardians of that faith. As deities of death, and an after life in which they would reserve for their faithful privileges unknown to others, these two were sovereign; they were the Queen Goddesses, the Most Holy, the mystic inseparable Two. Their yearly festival at the Attic town of Eleusis was the most august and the most frequented of all the religious solemnities of Greece; and from that parent festival other local Eleusinia were propagated far and wide.

I was walking a few weeks ago on the ground where the great temple of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis used to stand. "Upon the jutting hill" -"beneath the town, above the fountain""-these are our poet's phrases in speaking of the site. The jutting hill is there, a long spur of rock closing the northern extremity of a beautiful sweeping bay which looks like a lake, its waters are so shut in by the opposite island of Salamis. Except where this spur juts out, the shore is formed by a width of level soil lying between the bay and the mountains of Citharon; and on that soil, the old Thriasian plain, the ancients believed that mankind had first been taught to sow and reap. Close to the remains of the ancient landing pier of the town, I found gangs of men trenching foundations and blasting stone for building; and on inquiry, learnt that a French capitalist was in the act of constructing new steam-mills, to grind for export the grain of the adjacent coast. Here, after our modern fashion, was a confirmation of the ancient glory of Eleusis more distinct than was to be found in any visible vestiges of the past. For the area of the great and holy temple can only just be traced out by a careful search. It is covered with the squalid houses of the modern village, which has clustered about the extremity of the spur, lower than where the ancient town was built. That was a "hill-set city," and the sacred buildings stood at its foot, between it and the plain. Just at the rise from the plain, you find the only considerable ruins that remain-those of the Propylæa, a stately portico built before the entrance to the temple, probably in Roman times, and on the model of the Propylæa of the Parthenon at Athens. The area of this portico has been cleared; the lowest drums of its columns are in their place; the floor is strewn with many huge and glittering fragments, and among the fallen capitals you may watch the Eleusinian women of to-day, a lithe-limbed race in striped Albanian costumes, dance their dances on seasons of Christian holiday.

The so-called Homeric hymn to Demeter, which we are about to read, is written in honour of the goddess under the last and highest of her attributes. The poet celebrates the mother and daughter, not as presiding over the sanctities of the hearth, and only incidentally as patronising the labours of the farm; but expressly as controlling the destinies of mortals after death. His point is to tell how the temple of their mystic worship was founded at their own command, and its ritual taken from their own lips. He tells of that foundation, and the events which led up to it

pro

in the simple and flowing manner of the old epics. It is not at all bable that this was a hymn ever used in the actual worship of the goddesses. There is nothing liturgical about it; it is rather in the nature of a ballad, recited, it may be, by a patriotic minstrel of Eleusis to the groups of strangers who thronged to the city, or, in competition with other such ballads, at one of those poetical tournaments which formed part, we know, of many of the Greek religious festivals. I say a minstrel of Eleusis, because of his special tone of pride in the town and locality, and because he ignores Athens; while his Ionian dialect would be quite proper to an Attic rhapsodist. It is their ballad character, and the community they have of style and diction with the Iliad and Odyssey, which have earned the title of Homeric for a certain number of Greek hymns, or narrative poems in praise of particular divinities, which have come down to us. This is the most beautiful of them all. It moves with much of the same easy grandeur as the Odyssey, it has the same romantic charm, and delights us with similar pictures of heroic manners, of chiefs trusted by their people, of beautiful unabashed virgins, of noble hospitality to strangers. Like the Odyssey, it tells us of gods going to and fro among mortals, unrecognised until they choose; of disguises, and feigning answers, and sudden revelations. But in the mourning mother, under her name Deo, it sets before us a passion more disconsolate and intense, and in the prayer for grace hereafter, thoughts more far-reaching and mysterious, than we ever find in the earlier epics. These spiritual marks, and others of language and grammatical form, indicate for it a date, impossible to fix with anything like precision, in the period between the decay of the epic and the rise of the tragic poetry in Greece. What seems to point, however, to an origin not later than the middle of the seventh century before Christ is this; that in the century which followed-a time of troubled conscience and great religious ferment in Greece-the primitive worship of Eleusis seems to have become sophisticated with foreign elements; new rites, purifications, mysteries were introduced by adepts both from Thrace and Krete; and of these the hymn takes no notice, but exhibits the religion in its simplest, healthiest phase. It is not, indeed, safe to build too much on what we find or do not find in a text so full as this is of corruptions, transpositions, omissions, and what not. Unluckily the sole manuscript is a deplorably bad one found in the last century at Moscow, and now at Leyden. Nevertheless, and with all its imperfections, what we have remains one of the most precious of all the products of the Greek genius. Our old writers got their knowledge of the myth from sources comparatively vitiated. Their authorities were Ovid, and the last of the Latin poets, Claudian, themselves imitators of Greek authorities of the decadence, of Kallimachos and Nikander. But in sending the reader to this hymn, we send him to the fountain-head.

In his essay before mentioned, Mr. Pater gives a good abstract of the hymn; but I have tried to do something different, and to place it entire, letting nothing that I could seize escape, in the possession of the VOL. XXXIII.-NO. 198.

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English reader. A poem, it may be objected, to be transferred from one literature into another, should be rendered in verse, not prose. But I hold with those who think the difficulties in the way of good poetical translation can hardly be overcome. If the translator is not really a poet, what he writes will not really be poetry, and is anything worse than the form of poetry without the substance? But if he is really a poet, then he is certain to have an individuality as such, a manner which is his own and which he cannot put away; and then his translation will be poetry, but may be a very different kind of poetry from the original. The familiar case in point is Pope's Homer. We have just witnessed another and very remarkable instance. Mr. Morris has translated the Æneid, approaching Virgil with much more scruple and scholarship than Pope used in approaching Homer, and rendering his text, with a surprising fidelity, almost line for line and word for word. The result is a monument of literary energy and versatility, but, as I think, is no more like the real Virgil than Pope's Homer is like the real Homer. Mr. Morris's primitive, unconstrained, inartificial style, and its charm, are the reverse of the intensely disciplined and elaborate style of Virgil, and its charm; and his primitiveness and unconstraint, Mr. Morris, being really a poet, is unable to alter or forego. The wonder is, that it should be possible for a translation to be so faithful to the matter, and so foreign to the manner, of its original as Mr. Morris's Eneids. No doubt, the ideal of perfect translation is when one poet translates another both in matter and manner. But how many instances of such perfection are there? One of these very Homeric hymns affords nearly such an instance-I mean the hymn to Hermes. Shelley's translation of that is a delightful English poem. There is a particular quality in the original, a tone of gaiety, which it has in common with one or two other of the hymns, and in contradistinction to ours of Demeter-and this tone of gaiety, almost of banter, Shelley has taken great pains to catch. But the form of verse which he has chosen, the ottava rima of Orlando Whistlecraft and Beppo, while it lends itself naturally to play and banter, does not at all remind us of the Homeric hexameter. And even in a performance like his, one of the treasures of our literature, many niceties of the original meaning are lost, for retaining which the freedom of prose is indispensable. As a rule, I think, prose is the right vehicle even for poetical translation-a prose which, in rendering poetry, must in some degree suggest the rhythms of verse, and may allow itself some license in inversions, and in the use of words proper to the Bible or the poets. The difficulty of such a style, which must suggest poetry, but be prose, is enhanced, for the purpose of rendering Homeric Greek, by the superabundance of compound epithets in the original. Compound epithets are a blot upon an English prose style. Even English poetry can hardly be too chary in using them. Our language cannot coin them off-hand, like the Greek or German; with us, a compound epithet must needs carry an emphasis, you cannot take it for granted or pass on. It is

either, as with weak writers, an awkwardness, or else, like Spenser's sea-shouldering whales, or like Keats's cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed, it is a felicity, which fastens the attention and remains in the memory. How, then, is one to treat the compound epithets which abound in Homer, and with a whole volley of which the present poem opens? A Homeric writer cannot name a person or object without instinctively naming a whole group of its qualities at the same time; maidens must always be deep-girdled, Hermes must always be the strong slayer of Argos, Zeus is always the loud-thundering and far-seeing son of Kronos; his brother Aïdes or Aïdoneus, the king of the dead, is always the many-named one, the receiver of many guests (by a characteristic euphemism, which I have been unable to preserve, as to the real character and comprehensiveness of his hospitality); kings are always trusty or close-counselled; maidens, most perplexing of all, are apt to have eyes, or countenances, like the calyx, or cup, of a flower not fully open. All these attributes come up as a matter of course in the mind of the poet, and are told in words that pass melodiously along the current of the verse. The only way is to turn the difficulty, to employ harsh coinages seldom, periphrases and relative clauses sometimes, and even in extreme cases, where the epithet will not come in without stopping the flow of the discourse, to leave it out. I have indicated the places where I have taken other liberties, as in smoothing over jolts or filling up gaps in the text. And I have allowed myself to interrupt the march of the story at points which seemed to call for comment. And now let the singer strike up

"I begin the song of Demeter the beautiful-haired, the holy goddess, both herself and her slender-ankled daughter, whom Aïdoneus seized, by the granting of loud-thundering far-seeing Zeus, where he found her playing, away from Demeter of the golden blade and shining fruit, among the deep-bosomed daughters of Oceanus, and gathering flowers along the soft meadow-roses and crocus and beautiful violets and flags and hyacinth, and that narcissus which earth by the device of Zeus brought forth for a lure to the maid, that He to whose house all come might have his desire; a thing of marvellous blossom it was, and a glory to all beholders, both immortal gods and mortal men; for a hundred heads had sprung up from the root thereof, and with its perfumed fragrance all the broad heaven laughed above, and all the earth, and the briny surges of the sea."

So far the verses roll, before the singer stops to take breath. Our language is shorter-winded, and has forced upon us breaks and pauses which are not in the text. The text, however, is perhaps not all genuine. The enchanted flower is described with an extravagance like that of a later age. The original description most likely ended with the words " a glory to all beholders." Be that as it may, there are two things which the reader ought to have present to his mind concerning