And what was
specially peculiar to the temper of the old Florentine painter,
Giotto, to the temper of his age in general, doubtless, more than to
that of ours, was the persistent and universal mood of the age in
which the story of Demeter and Persephone was first created. If some
painter of our own time has conceived the image of The Day so
intensely, that we hardly think of distinguishing between the image,
with its girdle of dissolving morning mist, and the meaning of the
image; if William Blake, to our so great delight, makes the morning
stars [100] literally "sing together,"--these fruits of individual
genius are in part also a "survival" from a different age, with the
whole mood of which this mode of expression was more congruous than
it is with ours. But there are traces of the old temper in the man
of to-day also; and through these we can understand that earlier
time--a very poetical time, with the more highly gifted peoples--in
which every impression men received of the action of powers without
or within them suggested to them the presence of a soul or will, like
their own--a person, with a living spirit, and senses, and hands, and
feet; which, when it talked of the return of Kore to Demeter, or the
marriage of Zeus and Here, was not using rhetorical language, but
yielding to a real illusion; to which the voice of man "was really a
stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist.
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