se obscure
_names_ are the only sources of information.

Helios is the sun-god; he is, or lives in, the sun. Apollo may have been
the sun-god too, but we still distrust the attempts to prove this by
contending guesses at the origin of his name. Moreover, if all Greek
gods could be certainly explained, by undisputed etymologies, as
originally elemental, we still object to such logic as that which turns
Saranyu into 'grey dawn.' We still object to the competing
interpretations by which almost every detail of very composite myths is
explained as a poetical description of some elemental process or
phenomenon. Apollo _may_ once have been the sun, but why did he make
love as a dog?

Lettish Mythology

These remarks apply equally well to our author's dissertation on Lettish
mythology (ii. 430 et seq.). The meaning of statements about the sun and
sky 'is not to be mistaken in the mythology of the Letts.' So here is no
disease of language. The meaning is not to be mistaken. Sun and moon
and so on are spoken of by their natural unmistakable names, or in
equally unmistakable poetical periphrases, as in riddles. The daughter
of the sun hung a red cloak on a great oak-tree. This 'can hardly have
been meant for anything but the red of the evening or the setting sun,
sometimes called her red cloak' (ii. 439). Exactly so, and the
Australians of Encounter Bay also think that the sun is a woman. 'She
has a lover among the dead, who has given her a red kangaroo skin, and in
this she appears at her rising.' {135} This tale was told to Mr. Meyer
in 1846, before Mr. Max Muller's Dawn had become 'inevitable,' as he
says.

The Lettish and Australian myths are folk-poetry; they have nothing to do
with a disease of language or forgotten meanings of words which become
proper names. All this is surely distinct. We proclaim the abundance of
poetical Nature-myths; we 'disable' the hypothesis that they arise from a
disease of language.

The Chances of Fancy

One remark has to be added. Mannhardt regarded many or most of the
philological solutions of gods into dawn or sun, or thunder or cloud, as
empty jeux d'esprit. And justly, for there is no name named among men
which a philologist cannot easily prove to be a synonym or metaphorical
term for wind or weather, dawn or sun. Whatever attribute any word
connotes, it can be shown to connote some attribute of dawn or sun. Here
parody comes in, and gives a not overstr