lso, they
were shaped by fancy into animals of various kinds--the bear, the wolf,
the dog, the ox; and into giant birds, and into monsters which were both
bird and beast.

"The winds, again, in their fancy, were the companions or ministers of
India, the sky-god. The spirits of the winds gathered into their host
the souls of the dead--thus giving birth to the Scandinavian and
Teutonic legend of the Wild Horseman, who rides at midnight through the
stormy sky, with his long train of dead behind him, and his weird hounds
before.[555:1] The Ribhus, or Arbhus, again, were the sunbeams or the
lightning, who forged the armor of the gods, and made their
thunderbolts, and turned old people young, and restored out of the hides
alone the slaughtered cow on which the gods had feasted."[555:2]

Aryan myths, then, were no more than poetic fancies about light and
darkness, cloud and rain, night and day, storm and wind; and when they
moved westward and southward, _the Aryan race brought these legends with
it_; and out of these were shaped by degrees innumerable gods and demons
of the Hindoos, the devs and jinns of the Persians; the great gods, the
minor deities, and nymphs, and fauns, and satyrs of Greek mythology and
poetry; the stormy divinities, the giants, and trolls of the cold and
rugged North; the dwarfs of the German forests; the elves who dance
merrily in the moonlight of an English summer; and the "good people" who
play mischievous tricks upon stray peasants among the Irish hills.
_Almost all, indeed, that we have of a legendary kind comes to us from
our Aryan forefathers_--sometimes scarcely changed, sometimes so altered
that we have to puzzle out the links between the old and the new; but
all these myths and traditions, and old-world stories, when we come to
know the meaning of them, take us back to the time when the Aryan race
dwelt together in the high lands of central Asia, and they all mean the
same things--that is, the relation between the Sun and the earth, the
succession of night and day, of winter and summer, of storm and calm, of
cloud and tempest, and golden sunshine, and bright blue sky. And this is
the source from which we get our fairy stories, and tales of gods and
heroes; for underneath all of them there are the same fanciful meanings,
only changed and altered in the way of putting them by the lapse of ages
of time, by the circumstances of different countries, and by the fancy
of those who kept the wonderful