The most poetic of these are perhaps the Hindu. At the heraldings of newer gods, the lords of other ghostlands have, after battling violently, swooned utterly away. But though many a fresher faith has been brandished at them, apathetically, in serene indifference, the princes of the Aryan sky endure. It is their poetry that has preserved them. To their creators poetry was abundantly dispensed. To no other people have myths been as frankly transparent. To none other, save only their cousins the Persians, have fancies more luminous occurred. The Persians so polished their dreams that they entranced the world that was. Poets can do no more. The Hindus too were poets. They were children as well. Their first lisp, the first recorded stammer of Indo-European speech, is audible still in the _Rig-Veda_, a bundle of hymns tied together, four thousand years ago, for the greater glory of Fire. The worship of the latter led to that of the Sun and ignited the antique altars. It flamed in Persia, lit perhaps the shrine of Vesta, afterward dazzled the Incas, igniting, meanwhile, not altars merely, but purgatory itself. In Persia, where it illuminated the face of Ormuzd, its beneficence is told in the _Avesta_, a work of such holiness that it was polluted if seen. In the _Rig-Veda_, there are verses which were subsequently accounted so sacred that if a soudra overheard them the ignominy of his caste was effaced. The verses, the work of shepherds who were singers, are invocations to the dawn, to the first flushes of the morning, to the skies' heightening hues, and the vermillion moment when the devouring Asiatic sun appears. There are other themes, minor melodies, but the chief inspiration is light. To primitive shepherds the approach of darkness was the coming of death. The dawn, which they were never wholly sure would reappear, was resurrection. They welcomed it with cries which the _Veda_ preserves, which the _Avesta_ retains and the _Eddas_ repeat. The potent forces that produced night, the powers potenter still that routed it, they regarded as beings whose moods genuflexions could affect. In perhaps the same spirit that Frenchmen assisted at a _lever du roi_, and Englishmen attend a prince's levee, the Aryan breakfasted on song and sacrifice. It was an homage to the rising sun. The sun was _deva_. The Sanskrit root _div_, from which the word is derived, produced deus, devi, divinities--numberless, accursed, adored, or forgot. The common term applied to all abstractions that are and have been worshipped, means _That which shines_ and the name which, in the early Orient, signified a star, designates the Deity in the Occident to-day.