Very beautiful is the myth which reverses the sad story of Persephone (and of Balder), and tells of the barren earth wooed by the returning spring. Freyr one day mounted the seat of Odin which was called air-throne, and whence a god might look over all the ways of earth. And looking out into giant-land far in the north, he saw a light flash forth as the aurora lights up the wintry sky.[86] And looking again, he saw that a maiden wondrously beautiful had just opened her father’s door, and that this was her beauty which shone out over the snow. Then Freyr left the air-throne and determined to send to the fair one and woo her to be his wife. Her name was Gerda.[87] Freyr sent his messenger Skirnir to carry his suit to Gerda; and Skirnir told her how great Freyr was among the gods, how noble and happy a place was Asgard, the home of the gods. For all Skirnir’s pleading Gerda would give no ear to his suit. But Freyr had given his magic sword (the sun’s rays) to Skirnir; and at last the ambassador, tired of pleading, drew that and threatened to take the life of Gerda unless she granted Freyr his wish. So she consented to meet him nine nights hence in the wood of Barri. The nine nights typify, it is thought, the nine winter months of the Northern year; and the name of the wood, Barri, means ‘the green;’ the beginnings of spring in the wood being happily imaged as the meeting of the fresh and the barren earth. All the elements of nature were personified by the spirit of Aryan poetry, and it would be a hopeless task--wearisome and useless to the reader--to give a mere category of the nature-gods in each system. Those which had most influence upon their religious thought were they who have been mentioned, the gods of the sky and sun and mother-earth. The other elemental divinities were (as a rule) more strictly bound within the circle of their own dominions. It is curious to trace the difference between these strictly polytheistic deities--coequal in their several spheres--and those others who arose in obedience to a wider ideal of a godhead. We have seen that the Indians had a strictly elemental heaven or sky, as well as their god Dyâus, and that they called him Varu_n_a, a word which corresponds etymologically to the Greek Ouranos, the heaven. In the later Indian mythology Varu_n_a came to stand, not for the sky, but for the wide expanse of ocean, and so corresponds to the Greek Poseidon, the Latin Neptune, and the Norse Œgir. All these were the gods of the sea and of all waters. The wind, as we saw, combined in the person of Odin with the character of a highest god; but in the Greek the part was played by an inferior divinity, Hermes. In India there is a wind-god (called Vaja); but the character is likewise divided among a plurality of minor divinities, the Ma_r_uts. Of Agni, the god of fire, corresponding to Hephæstus and Vulcan, we have spoken; and in the North Fire is not a god at all, but an evil being called Loki. This is enough