Ceres allowed herself to be pacified with this arrangement, and restored the earth to her favor.  Now she remembered Celeus and his family, and her promise to his infant son Triptolemus.  When the boy grew up, she taught him the use of the plough, and how to sow the seed.  She took him in her chariot, drawn by winged dragons, through all the countries of the earth, imparting to mankind valuable grains, and the knowledge of agriculture.  After his return, Triptolemus built a magnificent temple to Ceres in Eleusis, and established the worship of the goddess, under the name of the Eleusinian mysteries, which, in the splendor and solemnity of their observance, surpassed all other religious celebrations among the Greeks.

There can be little doubt of this story of Ceres and Proserpine being an allegory.  Proserpine signifies the seed-corn which when cast into the ground lies there concealed—­that is, she is carried off by the god of the underworld.  It reappears—­that is, Proserpine is restored to her mother.  Spring leads her back to the light of day.

Milton alludes to the story of Proserpine in “Paradise Lost,” Book iv.: 

“. . .  Not that fair field Of Enna where Proserpine gathering flowers, Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world,—­ ... might with this Paradise Of Eden strive.”

Hood, in his “Ode to Melancholy,” uses the same allusion very beautifully: 

    “Forgive, if somewhile I forget,
       In woe to come the present bliss;
     As frighted Proserpine let fall
       Her flowers at the sight of Dis.”

The River Alpheus does in fact disappear underground, in part of its course, finding its way through subterranean channels till it again appears on the surface.  It was said that the Sicilian fountain Arethusa was the same stream, which, after passing under the sea, came up again in Sicily.  Hence the story ran that a cup thrown into the Alpheus appeared again in Arethusa.  It is this fable of the underground course of Alpheus that Coleridge alludes to in his poem of “Kubla Khan”: 

    “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
       A stately pleasure-dome decree,
     Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
     Through caverns measureless to man,
       Down to a sunless sea.”

In one of Moore’s juvenile poems he thus alludes to the same story, and to the practice of throwing garlands or other light objects on his stream to be carried downward by it, and afterwards reproduced at its emerging: 

    “O my beloved, how divinely sweet
     Is the pure joy when kindred spirits meet! 
     Like him the river god, whose waters flow,
     With love their only light, through caves below,
     Wafting in triumph all the flowery braids
     And festal rings, with which Olympic maids
     Have decked his current, as an offering meet