The early Aryan priest, who was to his race what our poets and thinkers are to us to-day, on awakening at dawn turned his face to the east, and, waiting for the light, cried, "Arise! arise! the breath of our life has come, the darkness has fled." The fire had to be kindled by men. "She, the Dawn, brought us light by striking down darkness.--Shine for us with thy best rays, O thou bright Dawn! thou who lengthenest our lives, thou beloved of all, thou mother of the morning clouds, leader of the days, gold-colored and lovely to behold!" When the sun at last climbed the mountain-tops and shone upon his worshipper, he sang a deeper hymn of joy to the Creator: "In the beginning there arose the source of golden light. He was the first-born lord of all that is. He established the earth and the sky. He gives us life, he gives us strength--whose shadow is immortality, whose absence is death--he who through his power is the only king of this breathing and awakening world."[14] These songs were not only sung, but transmitted from father to son, long before the age of a written alphabet, as a sacred, inviolable inheritance, preserved from century to century in the religious memory of the Aryan priest, even as they were recited to us evening after evening at the "Aviary" by our modern pundit without book or notes or text. The pictures these songs present of the deep religious and poetic fervor of the early Aryans, both before and after their descent into the plains of India, of their pastoral and agricultural life, divided into separate and distinct classes, as priest, king, shepherd, warrior, and tiller of the soil, are in themselves the most comprehensive and valuable of historical records. The first and most important fact to be found in the study of these hymns is that every home, every dwelling, has its own altar, which is the family hearth, called the "dâdgâh" by the Fire-worshippers--that "holy of holies" of which father and mother were priest and priestess. This fire is the ancient "avesta," to which were attached three mystical interpretations--first, "womanly purity;" second, the "inviolability of the family;" and third, "the sacredness attached to the mother as the transmitter of human life." There is no doubt that from the Assyrians, Chaldeans, and the early Iranians, who were then one with the purer Hindoos of to-day, this worship of nature, and especially of fire in its triple significance, was propagated southward among the Egyptians, westward among the Greeks, and by them introduced into Italy.