In the “Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” which Pater said had been the most laborious and difficult piece of work he had ever done, he traces the complex shadowy legend from its early origins. The Mother of Nature, with her power over the kindly fruits of the earth, is first depicted; and then in the midst of her passionless content, her easy benevolence, her daughter is snatched away to be queen among the dead; the mother, in a sad indifference of grief, sets out stony-hearted on the quest, sometimes blasting, sometimes blessing the earth through which she passes, losing, in the stress of that bitter sorrow, the balance of mind, the responsibility, which her influence had brought her. Pater shows that behind all the brightness, the hopefulness, the impassioned geniality of the Greek creed, there lay a shadow:— “The ‘worship of sorrow,’ as Goethe called it, is sometimes supposed to have had almost no place in the religion of the Greeks. Their religion has been represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity, conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous activity. It helped to hide out of their sight those traces of decay and weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle age; and it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people who, in truth, were never ‘sick or sorry.’ But this familiar view of Greek religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is known concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin to that which underestimates the influence of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had dealt exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art and poetry leaves in the central expressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities; and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient to show that the ‘worship of sorrow’ was not without its function in Greek religion; their legend is a legend made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people; while the most important artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a matter, at first sight painful and strange.”