9. The time, then, at which I shall take up for you, as well as I can decipher it, the traditions of the gods of Greece, shall be near the beginning of its central and formed faith,--about 500 B.C.,--a faith of which the character is perfectly represented by Pindar and Æschylus, who are both of them outspokenly religious, and entirely sincere men; while we may always look back to find the less developed thought of the preceding epoch given by Homer, in a more occult, subtle, half-instinctive, and involuntary way. 10. Now, at that culminating period of the Greek religion, we find, under one governing Lord of all things, four subordinate elemental forces, and four spiritual powers living in them and commanding them. The elements are of course the well-known four of the ancient world,-- the earth, the waters, the fire, and the air; and the living powers of them are Demeter, the Latin Ceres; Poseidon, the Latin Neptune; Apollo, who has retained always his Greek name; and Athena, the Latin Minerva. Each of these are descended from, or changed from, more ancient, and therefore more mystic, deities of the earth and heaven, and of a finer element of æther supposed to be beyond the heavens;* but at this time we find the four quite definite, both in their kingdoms and in their personalities. They are the rulers of the earth that we tread upon, and the air that we breathe; and are with us closely, in their vivid humanity, as the dust that they animate, and the winds that they bridle. I shall briefly define for you the range of their separate dominions, and then follow, as far as we have time, the most interesting of the legends which relate to the queen of the air. * And by modern science now also asserted, and with probability argued, to exist. 11. The rule of the first spirit, Demeter, the earth mother, is over the earth, first, as the origin of all life,--the dust from whence we were taken; secondly, as the receiver of all things back at last into silence --"Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." And, therefore, as the most tender image of this appearing and fading life, in the birth and fall of flowers, her daughter Proserpine plays in the fields of Sicily, and thence is torn away into darkness, and becomes the Queen of Fate--not merely of death, but of the gloom which closes over and ends, not beauty only, but sin, and chiefly of sins the sin against the life she gave; so that she is, in her highest power, Persephone, the avenger and purifier of blood--"The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me out of the ground." Then, side by side with this queen of the earth, we find a demigod of agriculture by the plough--the lord of grain, or of the thing ground by the mill. And it is a singular proof of the simplicity of Greek character at this noble time, that of all representations left to us of their deities by their art, few are so frequent, and none perhaps so beautiful, as the symbol of this spirit of agriculture.