Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/260

228 BOOK to her betokens a more distinct personality than that even of Varuna and Indra, because the worshipper in addressing her speaks always from the heart, and his words are the manifest utterances of love. She is the daughter of the heaven, who brings with her light and life and joy ; she drives away pain and anguish ; she is the image of undying youth, for day by day she appears in unfading beauty, although they who look upon her grow daily older and at last die.^ "Ushas, nourishing all, comes daily like a matron, conducting all transient (creatures) to decay." ^

" The divine and ancient Ushas, born again and again and bright with unchanging hues, wastes away the life of a mortal, like the wife of a hunter cutting up the birds." ^

"How long is it that the dawns have risen? How long will they rise ?

" Those mortals who beheld the pristine Ushas dawning have passed away : to us she is now visible, and they approach who will behold her in after times."*

Like the Greek Athene, she is pure and unsullied, the image of truth and wisdom.

" Ushas, endowed ^ith truth, who art the sister of Bhava, the sister of Varuna, be thou hymned first of the gods." " Unimpeding divine rites, although wearing away the ages of mankind, the Dawn shines the likeness of the mornings that have passed, or that are to be for ever, the first of those that are to come." ^

In all this, although it determines the source of later myths beyond all possibility of question, there is little or no mythology ; and we have advanced scarcely more than half-way on the road to a full- formed myth even when we read that " the night, her sister, prepares a birthplace for her elder sister (the day), and having made it known to her departs ; " that the night and dawn "of various comple.xions, repeatedly born but ever youthful, have traversed in their revolutions alternately from a remote period earth and heaven — night with her dark, dawn with her luminous limbs," ^ or that "of all the sisters who have gone before a successor daily follows the one that has i)re- ceded."^ It is this very transparency of meaning which imparts

the mythical beings beloved by the evening of the world is come. Dawn. This is the idea of the myth of * H. H. Wilson, A'. F. Sanhita, i. KAs and Tithonos, and it seems to be 129. united with that of Odin, Savitri, or * lb. i. 274. * Ih. i. 298. Odysseus the wanderers, in the story of * lb. ii. 8, ID. * lb. ii. 12. the Wandering Jew. The myth is here, ' lb. i. 169. •as we might expect, strangely distorted : * //'. ii. 12. The idea of Ushas as
 * Hence the decrepitude of some of but the Jew must wander on until the