GRASS AND GREEN THINGS. 1^ 



breathing of the flowers, which floated like clouds of beauty over the 

 grassy temples of the ancient Britons. 



When man, first waking up from a rude and brutal barbarism, 

 perceived the relations of the world without to the world within him- 

 self, he sought to embody the unshapen poetry of his rugged heart in 

 some form of simple beauty, and he took the grass as the first repre- 

 sentative of the exuberance of nature, and the renewing beauty of her 

 primal glory. He made manifest his thankfulness for the fruits of 

 the ground in ofiferings to the powers of nature of the green grass 

 which made beautiful his pathway through the world, and by the seeds 

 of which his fields were sown with plenty. The period is of immense 

 antiquity when the inhabitants of the sacred region of the Nile began 

 first, from the vestal hearth, to sacrifice to the celestial gods, not 

 myrrh, cassia, nor the first fruits of things mingled with the crocus of 

 frankincense — for afterwards, when wanting the necessities of life, 

 those were ofiered with great labour and many tears, as libations to 

 the god, — " but grass, which as a certain soft wool of a prolific nature, 

 they plucked with their hands." " They gathered the blades and the 

 roots, and all the germs of this herb, and committed them to the 

 flames, as a sacrifice to the gods, to whom they paid immortal honour 

 through fire."* Hence, too, the patriarchs and poets of the olden 

 times painted Damater, the mother of the gods — the same that was 

 Cu-bell, the chief goddess of the Chaldeans, the Cybele of the lonians, 

 and the Rhoia of the Doric people — as sitting amid green grass, and 

 surrounded with fragrant flowers. On the oldest coins of Syria she 

 sits beside the hive, with ears of corn in her hands, to denote the 

 return of the seasons and their exuberance of fruits ; while at her 

 feet the grasses grow and wave, to typify the seasonal renewals of 

 green beauty on the earth. So, too, the benefactors of humanity were 

 represented as surrounded with emblems of rural beauty, and as such, 

 Saturn, the man of piety and justice, is described with the sickle in 

 hand, going over the earth to teach its people the tillage of its soil. 

 It was in the season of spring grass, too, that the band of heroes under 

 Jason set out under the guidance of the dove, which was directed by 

 the hand of Minerva, to regain the Golden Fleece. It was at the 

 time — 



* Porphyry de Abstinentia. — Book II., sec. 5. 



