22. One of the prettiest, oldest, and most universally favorite solar myths is the one which represents the Sun as a divine being, youthful and of surpassing beauty, beloved by or wedded to an equally powerful goddess, but meeting a premature death by accident and descending into the dark land of shades, from which, however, after a time he returns as glorious and beautiful as before. In this poetical fancy, the land of shades symbolizes the numb and lifeless period of winter as aptly as the Waters of Death in the Izdubar Epic, while the seeming death of the young god answers to the sickening of the hero at that declining season of the year when the sun's rays lose their vigor and are overcome by the powers of darkness and cold. The goddess who loves the fair young god, and mourns him with passionate grief, until her wailings and prayers recall him from his deathlike trance, is Nature herself, loving, bountiful, ever productive, but pale, and bare, and powerless in her widowhood, while the sun-god, the spring of life whence she draws her very being, lies captive in the bonds of their common foe, grim Winter, which is but a form of Death itself. Their reunion at the god's resurrection in spring is the great wedding-feast, the revel and holiday-time of the world. 23. This simple and perfectly transparent myth has been worked out more or less elaborately in all the countries of the East, and has found its way in some form or other into all the nations of the three great white races--of Japhet, Shem, and Ham--yet here again the precedence in point of time seems due to the older and more primitive--the Yellow or Turanian race; for the most ancient, and probably original form of it is the one which was inherited by the Semitic settlers of Chaldea from their Shumiro-Accadian predecessors, as shown by the Accadian name of the young solar god, DUMUZI, "the unfortunate husband of the goddess Ishtar," as he is called in the sixth tablet of the Izdubar epic. The name has been translated "Divine Offspring," but in later times lost all signification, being corrupted into TAMMUZ. In some Accadian hymns he is invoked as "the Shepherd, the lord Dumuzi, the lover of Ishtar." Well could a nomadic and pastoral people poetically liken the sun to a shepherd, whose flocks were the fleecy clouds as they speed across the vast plains of heaven or the bright, innumerable stars. This comparison, as pretty as it is natural, kept its hold in all ages and nations on the popular fancy, which played on it an infinite variety of ingenious changes, but it is only cuneiform science which has proved that it could be traced back to the very earliest race whose culture has left its mark on the world.