myrtle-grove and lonely mountain-glen have had favors granted him even
by Idalian Aphrodite the Beautiful, and felt her warm breath glowing
upon his forehead, or been counselled by the blue-eyed Athene, or been
elevated to ample rule by Herè herself, Heaven's queen? That Greek
heaven was heartless, libidinous, and cold. It had no mild divinities
appointed to bind up the broken heart and assuage the grief of the
mourner. The weary and the heavy-laden had no celestial resource
amongst its immortal revellers and libertines, male and female. There
was no sympathy for mortal suffering amongst those divine sensualists.
They talked with contempt and unsympathizing ridicule of the woes of
the earthborn, of the brevity of mortal life, and of its miseries. A
boon, indeed, and a grateful exchange, was the Mother Mild of the Roman
Catholic Pantheon, the patroness of the broken-hearted, who inclines
her countenance graciously to the petitions of womanly anguish, for the
voluptuous Aphrodite, the haughty Juno, the Di-Vernonish Artemis, and
the lewd and wanton nymphs of forest, mountain, ocean, lake, and river.
Ceres alone, of the old female classic daemons, seemed to be endowed
with a truly womanly tenderness and regard for humankind. She, like the
Mater Dolorosa, is represented in the myths to have known bereavement
and sorrow, and she, therefore, could sympathize with the grief of
mothers sprung from Pyrrha's stem. Nay, she had envied them their
mortality, which enabled them to join their lost ones, who could not
come back to them, in the grave. Vainly she sought to descend into the
dark underworld to see her "young Persephone, transcendent queen of
shades." Not for her weary, wandering feet was a single one of the
thousand paths that lead downward to death. Her only consolation was in
the vernal flowers, which, springing from the dark earthly mould,
seemed to her to be

"heralds from the dreary deep,