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32
MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
BOOK I.
Vedas with their strict mythical meaning. The marvellous exuberance of this early language, and the wealth of its synonyms, may well excite astonishment as we watch its divergence into such myths as those of Kephalos and Endymiôn, Heraklês, Daphnê, the Pythian and Delian Apollôn, Phaethôn and Meleagros, Memnôn and Bellerophôn.
Solar myhts.That the form of thought which found utterance in mythical language would lead to the accumulation of a vast number of names for the same object, we have already seen; and so clearly does the mythology of the Aryan nations exhibit the working of this process, that the task of tracing it through the several legends of which it is composed becomes almost a superfluous work. It seems impossible not to see that when the language of mythology was the ordinary speech of daily life, the night laboured and heaved with the birth of the coming day, and that his toil and labour are reproduced in the Homeric hymn, in which Lêtô, the power of forgetfulness and sleep, gives birth to the lord of light in Delos. His coming was preceded by the pale twilight who, in mythical times, drove his cows to their pastures; but in the Odyssey his herds feed at Tainaron or in Thrinakia far away, where Phaethousa and Lampetiê, the bright and gleaming daughters of Neaira, the early morning, tend them at the rising and the setting of the sun. The old mythical feeling is strikingly manifest throughout the whole legend, not merely in the names and office of the wife and children of Hehos, but in the delight with which the Sun-god gazes on his cattle at the beginning and the close of his daily course, and in the indignation which prompts him, when they are slain, to hide his light in the regions of the dead. But the sun loves not only the clouds but the dawn who is their leader; and so the dawn comes before us as followed by him, and flying from his love, or else as returning it. The former phrase ("the dawn flies from the sun") is embodied in the legend of Daphnê, who flies from her lover and vanishes away as he seeks to embrace her. In the tale of Orpheus she appears, under the name of Eurydikê, as the bride of the sun, loved by him and returning his love, yet falling a victim to it, for whether to Daphnê or Eurydikê the brightness of his glance is fatal as he rises higher in the heaven. The same feeling is manifest under a form, if possible, more intense, in the tale of Kephalos and Prokris. "The sun loves the dew," was the old mythical phrase; and it is reproduced in the love of Kephalos (the head of the sun) for Prokris, the glittering dewdrop. But "the morning loves the sun." Eôs seeks to win Kephalos for herself; and her jealousy of Prokris is at once explained. But again the dewdrops