The happy owner of this magic weapon, Freyr, presided over the general administration of the clouds; it was he who made fine weather or rain, a very troublesome office, which must have exposed him to countless petitions and most contradictory prayers. His sister Freya, afterwards called Frigg, was Odin’s wife and the most honored goddess on earth as well as in heaven. She inspired and protected lovers, and very different from her sister in Greece, this Northern Venus enjoyed an unsullied reputation. They say that once, when her husband had gone away on a long journey, she was so deeply grieved at his absence, that her tears ran day and night incessantly; these tears, however, differed from those of mortal beings; “they were all drops of gold which fell into her bosom,”--and hence the Northern people call the precious metal to this day _Freyas tears_. One only among all the dwellers in Walhalla had been able to give her some comfort by singing {144}his sweetest songs; this was the god Bragi, the god of poetry and beautiful words. A tradition which deserves to be mentioned here, accounts for the manner in which he obtained this precious gift of eloquence and the art of poetry. In the early days of the world, when the creating god had concentrated, so to say, all the active powers of humanity in a few individuals, and when a long life permitted these favored beings to carry on their studies till they reached a happy end, there lived on earth a wise man who possessed an art unknown, not among men only, but among the gods themselves. This was the art of perpetuating thoughts by word-painting, of reproducing them in outward forms, not to the eye by colors, but to the ear by sounds. This sage was called Kvasir. He had invented the _Runes_, the art of poetry, and the no less precious art of reproducing words and fixing them in writing. He cut his runes on beech tablets; if he had gone a step farther, he would have invented printing long before Guttenberg. Kvasir was then the sole owner of the art of Poetry.