we are astonished to
find that while the Greek Dawn-lady has remained almost always a mere
abstraction, the Indian spirit is a lovely, living woman instinct with
the richest sensuous charms of the East. Some twenty hymns are
addressed to her, and for the most part they are alive with real
poetry, with a sense of beauty and gladness and sometimes withal an
under-note of sadness for the brief joys of life. But when we look
carefully into it we notice a curious thing: all this hymn-singing to
Ushas is purely literary and artistic, and there is practically no
religion at all at the back of it. A few stories are told of her, but
they seem to convince no one, and she certainly has no ritual worship
apart from these hymns, which are really poetical essays more than
anything else. The priestly poets are thrilled with sincere emotion at
the sight of the dawn, and are inspired by it to stately and lively
descriptions of its beauties and to touching reflections upon the
passing of time and mortal life; but in this scene Ushas herself is
hardly more than a model from an artist's studio, in a very Bohemian
quarter. More than once on account of her free display of her charms
she is compared to a dancing girl, or even a common harlot! Here the
imagination is at work which in course of time will populate the Hindu
Paradise with a celestial _corps de ballet_, the fair and frail
Apsarasas. Our Vedic Ushas is a forerunner of that gay company. A
charming person, indeed; but certainly no genuine goddess.

As his name shows, Surya is the spirit of the sun. We hear a good deal
about him in the Rig-veda, but the whole of it is merely description
of the power of the sun in the order of nature, partly allegorical,
and partly literal. He is only a nature-power, not a personal god. The
case is not quite so clear with Savita, whose name seems to mean
literally "stimulator," "one who stirs up." On the whole it seems most
likely that he represents the sun, as the vivifying power in nature,
though some[6] think that he was originally an abstraction of the
vivifying forces in the world and later became connected with the sun.
However this may be, Savita is and remains an impersonal spirit with
no human element in his character.

[Footnote 6: See Oldenberg, _Religion des Veda_, p. 64 f.]

Still more perplexing are the two deities Mitra and Varuna, who are
very often associated with one another, and apparently are related.
Mitra certainly is an old go