Tlie Poets Herds. 271 



fields of heaven- The lowering, gloomy rain-nimbus tossed 

 its head and pawed the air ; in the lighter drift they saw 

 the sporting calves. The end of the world was a slaughter- 

 yard, and Nature closed the volume in a catastrophic 

 Smithfield. 



This is no exaggeration of the prominence of the cattle 

 in myth. The bull and the cow represent in turn nearly 

 everything that man then distinguished in the elements of 

 the earth or their functions, everything that he saw in the 

 skies above the earth, and everything that he guessed at in 

 the depths below it Never were there such kine before. 



They wandered about in such a maze of avatars that it 

 seemed impossible they could ever turn up as mere cows 

 again, and no Protean divinity — whether in classical myth 

 or modem fairy tale — had such a phantasmagoric repertory. 

 They impersonated everything, and everjthing at once. 

 The cow was a cloud in the sky, which was itself a cow. 

 The king in his fortress was a cow, and the forest about 

 the fortress was a cow, and so was the cave within the 

 forest about the fortress, and so was the giant inside the 

 cave within the forest about the fortress in which the cow- 

 king lived. Cow was stuffed within cow, like the bird within 

 bird which we find in the Yorkshire pie ; and every incident 

 of Nature — human, zoological, or elementary — revolved 

 round the bovine idea just as things do round the malt 

 "that lay in the house that Jack built." The cow, again, 

 is the thunder and the lightning too, both rain and sunshine, 

 sun, moon, and stars. Then it gets mixed up with auroras 

 and twilights, till, in the confusion of metamorphoses, we 

 find the cow-morning pursuing the cow-night — each being 

 attended by its appropriate twilight calf — and we find them 

 also running away from each other by the light of the cow- 

 stars that are shining out of the cow-sky. 



And the bull is alongside all the time, and every now 

 and then there is a calf to complicate the situation. It 



