3. Thus, in the traditions of every ancient nation, there is a vast and misty tract of time, expressed, if at all, in figures of appalling magnitude--hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of years--between the unpierceable gloom of an eternal past and the broad daylight of remembered, recorded history. There, all is shadowy, gigantic, superhuman. There, gods move, dim yet visible, shrouded in a golden cloud of mystery and awe; there, by their side, loom other shapes, as dim but more familiar, human yet more than human--the Heroes, Fathers of races, founders of nations, the companions, the beloved of gods and goddesses, nay, their own children, mortal themselves, yet doing deeds of daring and might such as only the immortals could inspire and favor, the connecting link between these and ordinary humanity--as that gloaming, uncertain, shifting, but not altogether unreal streak of time is the borderland between Heaven and Earth, the very hot-bed of myth, fiction and romance. For of their favorite heroes, people began to tell the same stories as of their gods, in modified forms, transferred to their own surroundings and familiar scenes. To take one of the most common transformations: if the Sun-god waged war against the demons of darkness and destroyed them in heaven (see p. 171), the hero hunted wild beasts and monsters on earth, of course always victoriously. This one theme could be varied by the national poets in a thousand ways and woven into a thousand different stories, which come with full right under the head of "myths." Thus arose a number of so-called HEROIC MYTHS, which, by dint of being repeated, settled into a certain defined traditional shape, like the well-known fairy-tales of our nurseries, which are the same everywhere and told in every country with scarcely any changes. As soon as the art of writing came into general use, these favorite and time-honored stories, which the mass of the people probably still received as literal truth, were taken down, and, as the work naturally devolved on priests and clerks, i.e., men of education and more or less literary skill, often themselves poets, they were worked over in the process, connected, and remodelled into a continuous whole. The separate myths, or adventures of one or more particular heroes, formerly recited severally, somewhat after the manner of the old songs and ballads, frequently became so many chapters or books in a long, well-ordered poem, in which they were introduced and distributed, often with consummate art, and told with great poetical beauty. Such poems, of which several have come down to us, are called EPIC POEMS, or simply EPICS. The entire mass of fragmentary materials out of which they are composed in the course of time, blending almost inextricably historical reality with mythical fiction, is the NATIONAL EPOS of a race, its greatest intellectual treasure, from which all its late poetry and much of its political and religious feeling draws its food ever after.