sorrow of earth robbed of its spring and summer, Dêmêtêr is portrayed wandering from land to land in bootless search of her lost daughter. We know how deep a significance this story had in the religious thought of Greece; how the representation of it composed the chief feature of the Eleusinian mysteries, and how these and other mysteries probably enshrined the intenser, more hidden feelings of religion, and continued to do so when mythology had lost its hold upon the popular mind. It is, indeed, a new-antique story, patent to all and fraught for all with solemnest meaning. So that this myth of the death of Proserpine has lived on in a thousand forms through all the Aryan systems. [Sidenote: Athenê and other goddesses.] Persephone is one of the most characteristic of the maiden-goddesses of whom we spoke above. The most literal and material interpretation of her myth would show her to be an embodiment of the grain, which sinks into the ground when it is sown and springs up again to live above the earth for half the year. But in a wider sense I have no doubt that Persephone is meant to typify the spring of which the grain might well be a sort of symbol, or to typify vegetation generally. And this is one of the natural characters belonging to the maiden-goddess. She is very frequently a goddess of spring in some aspect or other--of spring as the season of beauty and love. Such is the Freyja of the Norse mythology; such, to some extent, are Aphroditê (Venus) and Artemis (Diana).[74] There is, however, one divinity among the Greeks who seems to have a somewhat different character, and who is so much more important a maiden-goddess than any of these that she at once springs into our thoughts when we are speaking of divinities of this class. I mean, of course, Athenê (Minerva). But in the first place, the wide worship of Athenê is partly accidental and due to her being the patroness of Athens; in the second place, Athenê has taken so many ethical characteristics, she is so advanced a conception of a divine being, that she is not at all a good representative of a religion in its early state. It would be rather confusing than otherwise to have to trace the character of Athenê step by step out of the natural phenomenon from which she sprang. I will only say here that I believe her to have been originally born from the sea or from a river. She may once have actually been a goddess of water. Afterwards she became, I think, the goddess of the rivers of heaven or the clouds. And as the clouds hold the storm and the lightning, Athenê is sometimes a storm-goddess, sometimes a goddess of the lightning.[75] Or again, she may be the heaven which bears the storm-cloud, the thundering heaven. We remember that Zeus and Athenê each have the privilege of wearing the Ægis--the dreadful fringed Ægis, which is, I think, the lightning-bearing cloud.