“Winter came; the wind was his whip One choppy finger was on his lip: He had torn the cataracts from the hills, And they clanked at his girdle like manacles, His breath was a chain that without a sound The earth, and the air, and the water bound; He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne By the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.” Here is not only metaphor, but personification so strong and vivid that it is only kept from passing into mythology by the conscious and reflective character of the age in which it was created. _Mythology._—The other great primitive creation wrought by the action of the human imagination, in its attempts to name and explain the appearances of visible Nature, was ancient mythology. That huge unintelligible mass of fable which we find imbedded in the poets of Greece and Rome has long been a riddle which no learning could read. But just as modern telescopes have resolved the dim masses of nebulæ into distinct stars, so the resources of that modern scholarship called Comparative Philology seems at last on the way to let in light on the hitherto impenetrable secret of the origin of religious myths. It has gradually been made probable that the Olympian gods, whatever capricious shapes they afterward assumed, were in their origin but the first feeble efforts of the human mind to name the unnamable, to give local habitation and expression to the incomprehensible Being who haunted men’s inmost thoughts, but was above their highest powers of conception. In making this attempt, the religious instinct of our Aryan forefathers wrought, not through the abstracting or philosophical faculty, but through the thought-embodying, shaping power of imagination, by which in later ages all true poets have worked, that in the dim foretime fashioned the whole fabric of mythology. It was the same faculty of giving a visible shape to thought.