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.