Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/245

Rh CHAP. said, ' How can that be a land without heroes or men where I am ? ' And naked he sprang up ; he thought it was too long to put on his dress. Then the Gandharvas sent a flash of lightning, and Urvasi saw her husband naked as by daylight. Then she vanished.^ 'I come back,' she said, and went. Then he bewailed his vanished love in bitter grief." Her promise to return was fulfilled, but for a moment only, at the Lotos-lake, and Pururavas in vain beseeches her to tarry longer. "What shall I do with thy speech ? " is the answer of Urvasi. " I am gone like the first of the dawns. Pururavas, go home again. I am hard to be caught like the winds." Her lover is in utter despair; but when he lies down to die, the heart of Urvasi was melted, and she bids him come to her on the last night of the year. For that night only he might be with her; but a son should be born to him.^ On that day he went up to the golden seats, and there Urvasi told him that the Gandharvas would grant him one wish, and that he must make his choice. "Choose thou for me," he said; and she answered, "Say to them, Let me be one of you." So the Gandharvas initiated Pururavas into their mysteries, and he became one of the Gandharvas.

In the story thus related in the Brahmana of the Yagur-Veda we Germs of have a maiden wedded to a being on whose form her eyes may not o^Vene^ rest, although she dwells in his house, and the terms of the compact are broken practically by herself, for although it is Pururavas who springs up, still it is Urvasi who provokes him to do so. Finally, she is impelled so to tempt him by beings who wish to obtain her treasures; and thus the element of jealousy enters into the legend. These leading ideas, of a broken pledge or violated secret, of beings jealous of her purity and happiness, and of immediate separation to be followed by reunion in the end, furnish the groundwork of a large group of stories belonging chiefly to the common lore of the people. They resolve themselves into the yet more simple notion of brief union broken by an early parting and a long absence, and this notion

'Compare the story of Ivan and " Go and be happy with the prince, my his frog-bride. — Gubernatis, Zoological friend : Alythology, ii. 377. But when he views the son that thou

the new year ; but whether the myth be Then hitherward direct thy prompt taken of that or any other sunrise, it return. is equally true that the mother must The fated term expires, and to con- vanish soon after her child has been sole born. Hence in the play of Kalidasa, His father for my loss, he is restored, after Urvasi has been reunited to her I may no longer tarry." lover, she tells him, ^'hen for your love I gladly left the See the analysis of this play by rrorcssor courts ^^'^^ MuUer, "Comparative Mytho- Of heaven, the monarch thus declared '°g>''" <^^">' "• '26. his will,
 * This child may be the first sun of shalt bear him,