CHAPTER VIII. SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH POETS DEAL WITH NATURE. Those who have not given attention to the subject are apt to imagine that the chief creators of mythological fables were the poets, and especially Homer. They suppose that the early poets, by sheer power of imagination, invented those stories to adorn their poems, and so gave them currency among the people. It was not so. Even Homer, the earliest poet whom we know, belonged to an era when the myth-creating instinct was past its prime, and already on the wane. The fables of the gods, their loves and their quarrels, as these appear in his poems, there is no reason to suppose that he created them or imagined them for the first time. It would rather seem that they had been long current in popular belief, and that he only used and gave expression to stories which he found ready-made. Here and there in Homer you may still detect some traces of the mythologizing tendency still lingering, and catch the primitive physical meaning of the myth shining through the anthropomorphic covering which it afterward assumed. Such glimpses we get in Zeus, when he gathers the clouds in the sky, when he rouses himself to snow upon men and manifests his feathery shafts, when he rains continuously, when he bows the heavens and comes down upon the peaks of Ida. Or again, when Poseidon, the earth-encompassing, the earth-shaker, yokes his car at Hegeæ and drives full upon the Trojan strand: I take the passage from Mr. Cordery’s translation of the Iliad:— “He entered in, And there beneath his chariot drew to yoke Fast-flying horses, maned with flowing gold, Hooved with bright brass; and girt himself in gold, Took golden goad, and sprang upon the car; So forth upon the billows, round whose path Huge monsters gamboled, gathering from the depth Afar, anear, and joyous knew their lord; Ocean for gladness stood in sunder cloven, Whilst lightly flew the steeds, nor ’neath the car The burnished axle moistened with the brine:— Thus tow’rd the fleet his coursers bore the god.” Here we have, half-physical, half-mythological, like Milton’s half-created lion, the fore part perfect, the hinder part still clay, a well-known natural appearance. After the storm-winds are laid, but while the sea still feels their power, it is thus that the high-crested breakers may be seen racing shorewards with their white manes backward streaming, and glorified with rainbow hues from a bright dawn or a splendid sunset poured upon them from the land.