d anguish.[554:4] He would have
many brides in many lands, and his offspring would assume aspects
beautiful, strange or horrible.[554:5] His course might be brilliant and
beneficent; or gloomy, sullen, and capricious.[554:6] As compelled to
toil for others, he would be said to fight in quarrels not his own; or
he might for a time withhold the aid of an arm which no enemy could
withstand.[554:7] He might be the destroyer of all whom he loved, he
might slay the Dawn with his kindling rays, he might scorch the Fruits,
who were his children; he might woo the deep blue sky, the bride of
heaven itself, and an inevitable doom might bind his limbs on the
blazing wheel for ever and ever.[554:8] Nor in this crowd of phrases,
all of which have borne their part in the formation of mythology, is
there one which could not be used naturally by ourselves to describe the
phenomena of the outward world, and there is scarcely one, perhaps,
which has not been used by our own poets. There is a beauty in them,
which can never grow old or lose its charm. Poets of all ages recur to
them instinctively in times of the deepest grief or the greatest joy;
but, in the words of Professor Max Mueller, "it is impossible to enter
fully into the thoughts and feelings which passed through the minds of
the early poets when they formed names for that far East from whence
even the early Dawn, the Sun, the Day, their own life seemed to spring.
A new life flashed up every morning before their eyes, and the fresh
breezes of the Dawn reached them like greetings wafted across the golden
threshold of the sky from the distant lands beyond the mountains, beyond
the clouds, beyond the dawn, beyond the immortal sea which brought us
hither! The Dawn seemed to them to open golden gates for the Sun to pass
in triumph; and while those gates were open, their eyes and their minds
strove, in their childish way, to pierce beyond the limits of this
finite world. That silent aspect wakened in the human mind the
conception of the Infinite, the Immortal, the Divine; and the names of
the Dawn became naturally the names of higher powers.[554:9]

"This imagery of the Aryans was applied by them to all they saw in the
sky. Sometimes, as we have said, the clouds were cows; they were also
dragons, which sought to slay the Sun; or great ships floating across
the sky, and casting anchor upon earth; or rocks, or mountains, or deep
caverns, in which evil deities hid the golden light. Then, a