d, in order to keep up an inexhaustible store of phrases
faithfully describing the facts of the world from their point of view.
This language was indeed the result of an observation not less keen than
that by which the inductive philosopher extorts the secrets of the
natural world. Nor was its range much narrower. Each object received its
own measure of attention, and no one phenomenon was so treated as to
leave no room for others in their turn. They could not fail to note the
changes of days and years, of growth and decay, of calm and storm; _but
the objects which so changed were to them living things, and the rising
and setting of the sun, the return of winter and summer, became a drama
in which the actors were their enemies or their friends_.

"That this is a strict statement of facts in the history of the human
mind, philology alone would abundantly prove; but not a few of these
phrases have come down to us in their earliest form, and point to the
long-buried stratum of language of which they are the fragments. _These
relics exhibit in their germs the myths which afterwards became the
legends of gods and heroes with human forms, and furnished the
groundwork of the epic poems, whether of the eastern or the western
world._

"The mythical or mythmaking language of mankind had no partialities; and
if the career of the _Sun_ occupies a large extent of the horizon, we
cannot fairly simulate ignorance of the cause. Men so placed would not
fail to put into words the thoughts or emotions roused in them by the
varying phases of that mighty world on which we, not less than they,
feel that our life depends, although we may know something more of its
nature.

"Thus grew up a multitude of expressions which described the sun as the
child of the night, as the destroyer of the darkness, as the lover of
the dawn and the dew--of phrases which would go on to speak of him as
killing the dew with his spears, and of forsaking the dawn as he rose in
the heaven. The feeling that the fruits of the earth were called forth
by his warmth would find utterance in words which spoke of him as the
friend and the benefactor of man; while the constant recurrence of his
work would lead them to describe him as a being constrained to toil for
others, as doomed to travel over many lands, and as finding everywhere
things on which he could bestow his love or which he might destroy by
his power. His journey, again, might be across cloudless skies, or amid