them good by, and thenceforth they may wash
their own dishes and scour their own tins, for all him.

But we are diverging from the subject of swan-maidens, and are in danger
of losing ourselves in that labyrinth of popular fancies which is more
intricate than any that Daidalos ever planned. The significance of
all these sealskins and feather-dresses and mermaid caps and
werewolf-girdles may best be sought in the etymology of words like the
German leichnam, in which the body is described as a garment of flesh
for the soul. [93] In the naive philosophy of primitive thinkers, the
soul, in passing from one visible shape to another, had only to put on
the outward integument of the creature in which it wished to incarnate
itself. With respect to the mode of metamorphosis, there is little
difference between the werewolf and the swan-maiden; and the similarity
is no less striking between the genesis of the two conceptions. The
original werewolf is the night-wind, regarded now as a manlike deity and
now as a howling lupine fiend; and the original swan-maiden is the
light fleecy cloud, regarded either as a woman-like goddess or as a
bird swimming in the sky sea. The one conception has been productive of
little else but horrors; the other has given rise to a great variety
of fanciful creations, from the treacherous mermaid and the fiendish
nightmare to the gentle Undine, the charming Nausikaa, and the stately
Muse of classic antiquity.

We have seen that the original werewolf, howling in the wintry blast,
is a kind of psychopomp, or leader of departed souls; he is the
wild ancestor of the death-dog, whose voice under the window of a
sick-chamber is even now a sound of ill-omen. The swan-maiden has also
been supposed to summon the dying to her home in the Phaiakian land.
The Valkyries, with their shirts of swan-plumage, who hovered over
Scandinavian battle-fields to receive the souls of falling heroes, were
identical with the Hindu Apsaras; and the Houris of the Mussulman belong
to the same family. Even for the angels,--women with large wings, who
are seen in popular pictures bearing mortals on high towards heaven,--we
can hardly claim a different kinship. Melusina, when she leaves
the castle of Lusignan, becomes a Banshee; and it has been a common
superstition among sailors, that the appearance of a mermaid, with her
comb and looking-glass, foretokens shipwreck, with the loss of all on
board.

October, 1870.

IV. LIGHT