The Eleusinia, collecting together, as it did, all the prominent elements of mythology, furnishes, in its dramatic evolution through Demeter and Dionysus, the highest and most complete representation of ancient faith in both of its developments.  In a former paper, we have endeavored to give this drama its deepest interpretation by pointing to the human heart as the central source of all its movements.  We shall now ask our readers to follow us out into these movements themselves,—­that, as before we saw how the world is centred in each human soul, we may now see how each soul develops itself in the world; for thither it is that the ever-widening cycles of the Eleusinian epos will inevitably lead us.

And first as an epos of sorrow:  though centring in the earthly Demeter, yet its movement does not limit itself by the remembrance of her nine days’ search; but, in the torch-light procession of the fifth night, widens indefinitely and mysteriously in the darkness, until it has inclosed all hearts within the circuit of its tumultuous flight.  Thus, by some secret sympathy with her movements, are gathered together about the central Achtheia all the Matres Dolorosoe,—­our Ladies of Sorrow;—­for, like her, they were all wanderers.

They were so by necessity.  All unrest involves loss, and thus leads to search.  It matters not if the search be unsuccessful; though the gadfly sting as sharply the next moment as it did the last, still so must continue her wanderings.  Therefore that Jew, whose mythic fate it is to wait forever upon the earth, the victim of an everlasting sorrow, is also an everlasting wanderer.  All suffering necessitates movement,—­and when the suffering is intense, the movement passes over into flight.

Therefore it is that the epos of suffering requires not merely time for its accomplishment, but also space.  Ulysses, the “much-suffering,” is also the “much-wandering.”

Thus our Lady in the Eleusinian procession of search represents the restless search of all her children.

Migrations and colonizations, ancient or modern,—­what were they but flights from some phase of suffering,—­name it as we may,—­poverty, oppression, or slavery?  It was the same suffering Io who brought civilization to the banks of the Nile.

Thus, from the very beginnings of history or human tradition, out of the severities of Scythian deserts there has been an endless series of flights,—­nomadic invasions of tribes impelled by no merely barbarian impulse, but by some deep sense of suffering, flying from their Northern wastes to the happy gardens of the South.  In no other way can you account for these movements.  If you attribute them to ferocity, what was it that engendered and nourished that?  Call them the results of a Divine Providence, seeking by a fresher current of life to revive systems of civilization which through long ages of luxury have come to frailty,—­still it was through this severity of discipline alone that Providence accomplished its end.  Besides, these nomads were fully conscious of their bitter lot; and those who fled not in space fled at least in their dreams,—­waiting for death at last to introduce them to inexhaustible hunting-grounds in their happy Elysium.