The Sea sweeps on in thousand quarters flowing, Itself unfruitful, barrenness bestowing; It breaks, and swells, and rolls, and overwhelms The desert stretch of desolated realms.... Let that high joy be mine for evermore, To shut the lordly Ocean from the shore, The watery waste to limit and to bar, And push it back upon itself afar! In such brave work Faust had many forerunners, whose art and courage have their monument in the fairer fables of all these elemental powers in which fear saw demons. Pavana, in India, messenger of the gods, rides upon the winds, and in his forty-nine forms, corresponding with the points of the Hindu compass, guards the earth. Solomon, too, journeyed on a magic carpet woven of the winds, which still serves the purposes of the Wise. From the churned ocean rose Lakshmí (after the solar origin was lost to the myth), Hindu goddess of prosperity; and from the sea-foam rose Aphrodite, Beauty. These fair forms had their true worshipper in the Northman, who left on mastered wind and wave his song as Emerson found it-- The gale that wrecked you on the sand, It helped my rowers to row; The storm is my best galley hand, And drives me where I go. CHAPTER V. ANIMALS. Animal demons distinguished--Trivial sources of Mythology--Hedgehog--Fox--Transmigrations in Japan--Horses bewitched--Rats--Lions--Cats--The Dog--Goethe's horror of dogs--Superstitions of the Parsees, people of Travancore, and American Negroes, Red Indians, &c.--Cynocephaloi--The Wolf--Traditions of the Nez Perces--Fenris--Fables--The Boar--The Bear--Serpent--Every animal power to harm demonised--Horns. The animal demons--those whose evil repute is the result of something in their nature which may be inimical to man--should be distinguished from the forms which have been diabolised by association with mythological personages or ideas. The lion, tiger, and wolf are examples of the one class; the stag, horse, owl, and raven of the other. But there are circumstances which render it very difficult to observe this distinction. The line has to be drawn, if at all, between the measureless forces of degradation on the one side, discovering some evil in animals which, but for their bad associations, would not have been much thought of; and of euphemism on the other, transforming harmful beasts to benignant agents by dwelling upon some minor characteristic.