At last the Spring has moved further than beauty. She has about her some of the richness of Summer. The earth has lost the faintly wistful air that she wore in March and April, the air of expectancy, as of one waiting the fulfilment of a promise. That promise is already realised—in the rich leaves that have clothed the trees, removing that earlier suggestion of austerity in their outline—in the first springing corn—in the first hard, small apples that appear in the orchards while the fallen blossom is still on the ground—in the shagginess of the hedges and the warm heaviness of the air, where scents are no longer fugitive, but lie thick and drowsy. The air too is full of wings—the wings of birds and insects, alert with their spring business; it is full of sounds as well as of movements and of scents—hummings and dronings and buzzings and trillings, the utterance of innumerable small voices. The air teems, the earth teems, though as yet Summer has not come, and over the hedges and fields lies the virginal white of the hawthorn and daisies. Mingled with the richness of Summer is still the white beauty of Spring, the expectancy of Spring, the freshness and coolness of Spring. * * * * * For many years the religions of the world had dreamed of a woman born of the foam of the sea. To the Greeks, Aphrodite had walked delicately over the waves, to the Hindu, Maya was born of the churning of the ocean. The dream was one of beauty and illusion—of beauty which in the throes of man’s imagination became lust and illusion which became peril. The religions of the world dreamed too of a woman who symbolised the teeming earth, the earth which brings forth her children, rejoices in them, loses them, seeks them and finds them again. Proserpine, Ceres, Isis, all stand as images of the fruitful earth in her joys and distresses. It has been made a reproach of Christianity that she has collected and preserved these dreams in the figure of Mary, Virgin and Mother. Mary, we are told has incorporated in her story the legends of Aphrodite, Maya, Ceres and Isis. Her very name is the name of the bitter, salt-tasting sea—her sorrows for her son untimely slain are the sorrows of Ceres who sought her daughter at the throne of Pluto, and of Isis who sought her son in the floods of the Underworld. They are all, first, in a dim legend, the sea whence life mysteriously came, and then in later myth the earth-mother living through the adventure of seed-time and harvest, Spring, Summer and Winter. Mary is the inheritor of them all, both earth and sea—the toiling mother of the year, and the far-off, virgin source of life.