Under other conditions the visitation of the god expresses itself in poetic form. Among the ruder peoples whose songs are of the simplest--perhaps the most childish--kind, the faculty of rhythmic utterance seems superhuman. Words, lines, stanzas, follow {181} each other with a spontaneity which seems out of the reach of ordinary effort. The chants of worship have been again and again carried back to divine authorship in a distant past. The marriage of speech with music is no art of man. So the Finnic hero, Wäinamöinen, conceived by the wind, and born (after seven hundred years in the womb) by the maiden Dmatar, added to his gifts of fertility and fire the invention of the harp, and the teaching of wisdom, poetry, and music to man. Odin was the god of wisdom and poetry for Scandinavia, god also of the holy draught, which, like the Indian Soma, gave inspiration. The poet brewed Odin's mead, bore Odin's cup; and in old Teutonic speech was _godh-mālugr_, "god-inspired." Hermes passed in Greece as the inventor of the lyre, which he gave to Apollo, chief among the deities who declared to man the unerring counsel of Zeus; and Homer already counts singer and song as alike divine. The lovely forms of the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory, or with an alternative mother in Harmony, were endowed with functions of song and prophecy, and between them and the historic poets stood a group, half mythical, half human, whose names were attached to actual hymns and poems. Such were Orpheus, Musseus, Eumolpus, Thamyris, and Linos. The verses ascribed to them tended to acquire an authoritative character; they were cited as a rule or norm for conduct; {182} they were on the way to become a Scripture. Homer and Hesiod were employed in the same way; and Plato denounces the mendicant prophets who went to rich men's doors offering to make atonements, and quoting Homer and Hesiod as religious guides. Nevertheless, though he proposed to banish from his ideal State the poets who said unworthy things of the gods, he elsewhere formulates the highest claim for poetry as a supernatural product. The poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed; "God takes away the minds of the poets;" "God himself is the speaker, through them he is conversing with us." It is the lament of the Bantus of South Africa that since the white man came the springs of music and song have ceased to flow: "The spirits are angry with their children, and do not teach them any more."