healthy fruitfulness of the soil; and so was made up the notion of a goddess, awful from her power, but a kind mother still to men. Eleusis was one of the chief seats of her worship, and thence originated a sort of sacred freemasonry, which was widely spread among the different tribes of Greece. For there were certain secret doctrines which only the initiated might learn, and rites at which only the initiated might assist; and these rites and doctrines, whatever they were, were no formal or trifling thing, but furnished a creed and an interest which raised the initiated, in some degree, to a higher level than his fellow-men. We have no means of guessing what it was that was taught in them. It has been supposed that some vestiges of the true faith, ideas of the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, were kept alive and handed down by these mysteries: however that may be, they were regarded as peculiarly holy, and the place on which the shadow of their solemnity fell could not fail to suggest grand thoughts to a powerful and imaginative mind. It can hardly be merely fanciful to ascribe, in some degree at least, to this influence the delight which Æschylus shows, throughout his extant works, in all that is mysterious and awful, as well as his preference for the more dimly known and ancient of the gods. A boyhood passed in longing to know the meaning of the crowds that constantly were coming to his native village, and of the long processions which sometimes passed through its fields; in wondering at the awestruck look of the men who came out from the sacred place, or in guessing the import of the dim
