In this phase, then, the story of Demeter appears as the peculiar creation of country-people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its sacredness, and a sort of [104] mystery about it. For there is much in the life of the farm everywhere which gives to persons of any seriousness of disposition, special opportunity for grave and gentle thoughts. The temper of people engaged in the occupations of country life, so permanent, so "near to nature," is at all times alike; and the habitual solemnity of thought and expression which Wordsworth found in the peasants of Cumberland, and the painter François Millet in the peasants of Brittany, may well have had its prototype in early Greece. And so, even before the development, by the poets, of their aweful and passionate story, Demeter and Persephone seem to have been pre-eminently the venerable, or aweful, goddesses. Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when the young lambs are dropped; she visits the barns in autumn; she takes part in mowing and binding up the corn, and is the goddess of sheaves. She presides over all the pleasant, significant details of the farm, the threshing-floor and the full granary, and stands beside the woman baking bread at the oven. With these fancies are connected certain simple rites; the half-understood local observance, and the half- believed local legend, reacting capriciously on each other. They leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel of meat, at the cross- roads, to take on her journey; and perhaps some real Demeter carries them away, as she wanders through the country. The incidents of their yearly labour become to [105] them acts of worship; they seek her blessing through many expressive names, and almost catch sight of her, at dawn or evening, in the nooks of the fragrant fields. She lays a finger on the grass at the road-side, and some new flower comes up. All the picturesque implements of country life are hers; the poppy also, emblem of an inexhaustible fertility, and full of mysterious juices for the alleviation of pain. The countrywoman who puts her child to sleep in the great, cradle-like, basket, for winnowing the corn, remembers Demeter Courotrophos, 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. Yet she is an angry goddess too, sometimes--Demeter Erinnys, the goblin of the neighbourhood, haunting its shadowy places. 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. Other lighter, errant stories nest themselves, as time goes on, within the greater. The water-newt, which repels the lips of the traveller who stoops to drink, is a certain urchin, Abas, who spoiled by his