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Rh analogy, from which we have gained so much of our apprehension of the world around us. Distrusted as it now is by severer science for its misleading results, analogy is still to us a chief means of discovery and illustration, while in earlier grades of education its influence was all but paramount. Analogies which are but fancy to us were to men of past ages reality. They could see the flame licking its yet undevoured prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent gliding along the waving sword from hilt to point; they could feel a live creature gnawing within their bodies in the pangs of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs answering in the echo, and the chariot of the Heaven-god rattling in thunder over the solid firmament. Men to whom these were living thoughts had no need of the schoolmaster and his rules of composition, his injunctions to use metaphor cautiously, and to take continual care to make all similes consistent. The similes of the old bards and orators were consistent, because they seemed to see and hear and feel them: what we call poetry was to them real life, not as to the modern versemaker a masquerade of gods and heroes, shepherds and shepherdesses, stage heroines and philosophic savages in paint and feathers. It was with a far deeper consciousness that the circumstance of nature was worked out in endless imaginative detail in ancient days and among uncultured races.

Upon the sky above the hill-country of Orissa, Pidzu Pennu, the Rain-god of the Khonds, rests as he pours down the showers through his sieve. Over Peru there stands a princess with a vase of rain, and when her brother strikes the pitcher, men hear the shock in thunder and see the flash in lightning. To the old Greeks the rainbow seemed stretched down by Jove from heaven, a purple sign of war and tempest, or it was the personal Iris, messenger between gods and men. To the South Sea Islander it was the