The statues of the supposed priestess, and of the enthroned Demeter, are of more than the size of life; the figure of Persephone is but seventeen inches high, a daintily handled toy of Parian marble, the miniature copy perhaps of a much larger work, which might well be reproduced on a magnified scale. The conception of Demeter is throughout chiefly human, and even domestic, though never without a hieratic interest, because she is not a goddess only, but also a priestess. In contrast, Persephone is wholly unearthly, the close companion, and even the confused double, of Hecate, the goddess of midnight terrors,--Despoena,--the final mistress of all that lives; and as sorrow is the characteristic sentiment of Demeter, so awe of Persephone. She is compact of sleep, and death, and flowers, but of narcotic flowers especially,--a revenant, who in the garden of Aidoneus has eaten of the pomegranate, and bears always the secret of decay in her, of return to the grave, in the mystery of those swallowed seeds; sometimes, in later work, holding in her hand the key of the great prison-house, but which unlocks all secrets also; (there, finally, or through oracles revealed in dreams;) sometimes, like Demeter, the poppy, emblem of sleep and death by its [149] narcotic juices, of life and resurrection by its innumerable seeds, of the dreams, therefore, that may intervene between falling asleep and waking. Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and still more in this statue, the image of Persephone may be regarded as the result of many efforts to lift the old Chthonian gloom, still lingering on in heavier souls, concerning the grave, to connect it with impressions of dignity and beauty, and a certain sweetness even; it is meant to make men in love, or at least at peace, with death. The Persephone of Praxiteles' school, then, is Aphrodite-Persephone, Venus-Libitina. Her shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter colouring of the under- world, and the tranquillity, born of it, has "passed into her face"; for the Greek Hades is, after all, but a quiet, twilight place, not very different from that House of Fame where Dante places the great souls of the classical world; Aidoneus himself being conceived, in the highest Greek sculpture, as but a gentler Zeus, the great innkeeper; so that when a certain Greek sculptor had failed in his portraiture of Zeus, because it had too little hilarity, too little, in the eyes and brow, of the open and cheerful sky, he only changed its title, and the thing passed excellently, with its heavy locks and shadowy eyebrows, for the god of the dead. The image of Persephone, then, as it is here composed, with the tall, tower-like head-dress, from which the veil depends--the corn-basket, [150] originally carried thus by the Greek women, balanced on the head--giving the figure unusual length, has the air of a body bound about with grave- clothes; while the archaic hands and feet, and a certain stiffness in