Or they thought of the many-coloured earth
as the garment of Demeter, as the great modern pantheist poet speaks
of it as the "garment of God." Its [98] brooding fertility; the
spring flowers breaking from its surface, the thinly disguised
unhealthfulness of their heavy perfume, and of their chosen places of
growth; the delicate, feminine, Prosperina-like motion of all growing
things; its fruit, full of drowsy and poisonous, or fresh, reviving
juices; its sinister caprices also, its droughts and sudden volcanic
heats; the long delays of spring; its dumb sleep, so suddenly flung
away; the sadness which insinuates itself into its languid
luxuriance; all this grouped itself round the persons of Demeter and
her circle. They could turn always to her, from the actual earth
itself, in aweful yet hopeful prayer, and a devout personal
gratitude, and explain it through her, in its sorrow and its promise,
its darkness and its helpfulness to man.
The personification of abstract ideas by modern painters or
sculptors, of wealth, of commerce, of health, for instance, shocks,
in most cases, the aesthetic sense, as something conventional or
rhetorical, as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech,
which could please almost no one.
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