What a picture the Greek singer makes of the melancholy earth calling for comfort to the moon! for Hecate was not Artemis, but a vaguer, vaster principle of the night; an impersonalized shadow of the Huntress, as Hertha was the shadow, formless and tremendous, of Demeter. Hecate was a pale luminous force, “half veiled with a shining veil, and thinking delicate thoughts,” and ten days later, having rounded to the full, the bereaved mother meets her “bearing a light in her hands,” though the night is nearing morning, and moon and earth turn together toward the coming sun. The Homeric Hymn tells much of the wandering and grieving mother; of her disguises; of her nursing of the sick child Demophoon, whose own mother snatched him back from the immortality which the goddess was ensuring by passing him through the fire—as many a loving and timid mother since has held her son back from the fires that confer immortality. The Hymn tells of her teaching of Triptolemus of the winged feet, instructing him in Eleusinian mysteries—“those mysteries which no tongue may speak. Only 191blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not as the lot of other men!” But Jane and Peripatetica loved more the story of the ending of her vigil, when Hermes descended into Hell in his chariot. “And Persephone ascended into it, and Hermes took the reins in his hands and drove out through the infernal halls; and they two passed quickly over the ways of that long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor of the rivers, and the deep ravines of the hills, nor the cliffs of the shore resisting them; till at last Hermes placed Persephone before the door of the temple where her mother was, who, seeing her, ran out quickly to meet her, like a Mænad coming down a mountain side dusky with woods.” So these two saw Persephone come home; saw the spring return to the earth in the high places of the gods. Saw the land, even though no longer a paradise, yet—despite Erysicthon’s foolish waste of the sacred trees—saw it “laden with leaves and flowers and the waving corn,” and, having seen it, they passed on through Sicily satisfied. 192 CHAPTER V   A City of Temples “’Tis right for him To touch the threshold of the gods.” They were running swiftly through the dark. On either hand was a dim and gloomy land of bare, shrivelled peaks, grey cinder heaps, and sulphurous smells. Intermittently visible by the strange subterranean glowings rose black, glowering mountains in the background, and nearer at hand were shadowy shapes of men and asses bringing sulphur from the mines. Within, the garlic-reeking tongue of a flickering gas-lamp vaguely illumined the dusk of the railway carriage.