272 The Poets Beasts. 



is a dreadful myth altogether, ranging from language to 

 language with exasperating indifference, and from people 

 to people as if there were no fences in the ethnical and 

 religious pastures in which it roves. It drags in, too, by 

 countless arms, like some octopus of theory, every symbol 

 of the folk-tale and fairy lore. 



Cinderella's slipper is proved to be a bull's tail. The 

 bean-stalk which Jack climbs is a cow's tail. The won- 

 derful lamp and the persecuted maiden, the girl that was 

 seven years old whom the thunder carried off, the three 

 dwarf brothers, and the magic flute, — are all of them modi- 

 fications, we are told, of the bovine idea, and the cock 

 comes in, and the hare and the crow, and the grateful 

 pike, and the quail and the fox, and the red apples, and 

 the kidney bean, and grief that inspires song, and the 

 shrimps that saved the fairy. 



Who, too, cannot at once see the connection between the 

 saviour bull and Turn-little-Pea, and Ivan who went out on 

 his crook-backed horse to look for the casket under the oak 

 at the bottom of the sea? and the witch that was burned in 

 the form of a cat, and the cock that came out of the moun- 

 tain, the Bird of Light that performed such wonders against 

 the serpent and tortoise, and Medea and Orpheus, and the 

 Strong Bear of the Finns ? Was not the bull sold to a tree, 

 and did not the tree burst and out of it come gold which 

 turned into bees ? And does not all this make it as clear 

 as cow-daylight that stock-raising was the only religion of 

 the earth once upon a time, and justify a firmament filled 

 with stars of beef that illuminate the Milky Way ? 



Wander as you will in these antique myths, and Nature 

 all round and above you, sunlit or moonlit or eclipsed, 

 is still all cattle. Go where you choose, they still bellow 

 and low, and paw and toss their heads, the luminous calf 

 and the azure cow, the black bull with the golden horns, 

 demoniacal cattle and celestial, malignant and benign. 



