tion in the myths on which the Phenician cosmogony was based. Philo Herennius' authority, who calls the opener Chrysôr, says of him: 'He was the first man who fared in ships.' This trait, which is far from fitting into the frame of the portrait of Hephaestus presents a very attractive and simple conception held by the men of the myth-forming age. We generally find in myths of the rising and setting of the sun, that the view which lives longest and conforms most naturally to the nature of the phenomenon is that the rising sun ascends out of the river or the sea, and that the setting sun sinks into the water.
The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea,
as Shakespeare says,[1] or as a German poet, feeling an echo of the meaning of the old myth, speaks still more expressively:
'—that the sun was only
A lovely woman, who the old sea-god
Out of convenience married;
All the day long she joyously wander'd
In the high heavens, deck d'out with purple
And glitt'ring diamonds,
And all-beloved and all-admired
By every mortal creature,
And every mortal creature rejoicing
With her sweet glance's light and warmth;
But in the evening, impell'd, all-disconsolate,
Once more returneth she home
To the moist house and desert arms
Of her grey-headed spouse.[2]
In a Swedish popular song, a King of England has two daughters, the elder black as night (Night itself); the other, younger, beautiful and brilliant like the day (Day itself). The latter goes forward followed by the other, who comes and throws her into the sea.[3] In this popular story, also,
- ↑ King Henry VI., Part II. Act IV. beginning.
- ↑ <Heinrich Heine, The Baltic [sic! i.e. 'die Nordsee' = the German Ocean], Part 2, No. 4 in E. A. Bowring's translation.
- ↑ In Henne-am-Rhyn, Die deutache Volkssage, Leipzig 1874. p. 292, No. 544.
