sea
of night, he leaps at daybreak in regained freedom upon the land, and
strikes down the oppressor who has held him in bondage.

But the sun, though ever victorious in open contest with his enemies,
is nevertheless not invulnerable. At times he succumbs to treachery,
is bound by the frost-giants, or slain by the demons of darkness. The
poisoned shirt of the cloud-fiend Nessos is fatal even to the mighty
Herakles, and the prowess of Siegfried at last fails to save him from
the craft of Hagen. In Achilleus and Meleagros we see the unhappy solar
hero doomed to toil for the profit of others, and to be cut off by an
untimely death. The more fortunate Odysseus, who lives to a ripe old
age, and triumphs again and again over all the powers of darkness, must
nevertheless yield to the craving desire to visit new cities and look
upon new works of strange men, until at last he is swallowed up in the
western sea. That the unrivalled navigator of the celestial ocean should
disappear beneath the western waves is as intelligible as it is that the
horned Venus or Astarte should rise from the sea in the far east. It is
perhaps less obvious that winter should be so frequently symbolized as a
thorn or sharp instrument. Achilleus dies by an arrow-wound in the
heel; the thigh of Adonis is pierced by the boar's tusk, while Odysseus
escapes with an ugly scar, which afterwards secures his recognition by
his old servant, the dawn-nymph Eurykleia; Sigurd is slain by a thorn,
and Balder by a sharp sprig of mistletoe; and in the myth of the
Sleeping Beauty, the earth-goddess sinks into her long winter sleep when
pricked by the point of the spindle. In her cosmic palace, all is locked
in icy repose, naught thriving save the ivy which defies the cold, until
the kiss of the golden-haired sun-god reawakens life and activity.

The wintry sleep of nature is symbolized in innumerable stories of
spell-bound maidens and fair-featured youths, saints, martyrs, and
heroes. Sometimes it is the sun, sometimes the earth, that is supposed
to slumber. Among the American Indians the sun-god Michabo is said to
sleep through the winter months; and at the time of the falling leaves,
by way of composing himself for his nap, he fills his great pipe and
divinely smokes; the blue clouds, gently floating over the landscape,
fill the air with the haze of Indian summer. In the Greek myth the
shepherd Endymion preserves his freshness in a perennial slumber. The
German Siegf