Excerpt from Demeter's Daughter Yet her joy is for ever shadowed by sadness, since without darkness there can be no light, and without death no living. She is a mother and has suffered the agony of loss. Still she flings off the blue hood of the sky and tears her veil of cloud still dry eyed, raving, she cries out against the Earth-shaker, at once her brother and the father of her precious one; still she hears Persephone's despairing cry in the voices of fearful birds and unhappy children; still she comes distraught amongst men to utter her wrongs and revenge herself upon the whole earth. Her name is gift, and, mourn as she may, out of her mighty heart's love she can still succour the children of men, still take them, as Demophoon of old, to her deep bosom and seek to render them im mortal in the red heart of altar fires. But few mothers can face that awful way of immortality for their babes; few men can read the truth of Demeter's counter-strokes against the relentless Zeus: in shut ting the watersprings, in holding up the curtains of the rain; in starving the seed corn under the furrow, in suffering the coulter vainly to tear an iron and a barren earth. One may, however, read the reconciliations of the Homeric hymn as prologue to these things to be told as a prelude of celestial music breaking forth upon a theatre where earth people, precious to the goddess, move and breathe and have their beginning, being, end; where on these dawn-facing hills of Holne Demeter leads the desert above to join hands with the tilth below, so that cultivated earth and high, waste places come congruently together and meet in peace. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.