"On her brest a chorl paintid ful even, _Bering a bush of thornis on his bake_, Which for his _theft_ might clime no ner the heven."
Comparing these with more familiar myths, we have our own man in the moon, who is said to be the culprit found by Moses gathering sticks on the Sabbath, although his place of banishment is a popular addition to the Scripture narrative. According to the German legend he was a scoffer who did the same heinous offence on a Sunday, and was given the alternative of being scorched in the sun or frozen in the moon. The Frisians say that he stole cabbages, the load of which he bears on his back. He does not appear as a member of the criminal classes in China, his function being that of celestial matchmaker, who ties together future couples with an invisible silken cord which breaks not during life. In Icelandic myth the two children familiar to us as Jack and Jill were kidnapped by the moon, and there they stand to this day with bucket on pole across their shoulders, falling away one after the other as the moon wanes,--a phase described in the couplet:--
"Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after."
Mr. Baring Gould, whose essay on this subject in his _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_ gives a convenient summary of current legends, contends that Jack and Jill are the Hjuki and Bil of the _Edda_, and signify the waxing and waning of the moon, their bucket indicating the dependence of rainfall on her phases--a superstition extant among us yet.
The group of customs observed amongst both barbaric and civilised peoples at the changes of the moon, customs which are meaningless except as relics of lunar worship, belong to the passage of mythology into religion, of personifying into deifying.
In the great body of nature-myth the stars are prominent members. In their multitude; their sublime repose in upper calms above the turmoil of the elements; their varying brilliancy, "one star differing from another star in glory"; their tremulous light; their scattered positions, which lend themselves to every vagary of the constellation-maker; their slow procession, varied only by sweeping comet and meteor, or falling showers of shooting stars; they lead the imagination into gentler ways than do the vaster bodies of the most ancient heavens. Nor, although we may compute their number, weigh their volume, in a few instances reckon their distance, and, capturing the light that has come beating through space for unnumbered years, make it reveal the secret of their structure, is the imagination less moved by the clear heavens at night, or the feeling of awe and reverence blunted before that "mighty sum of things for ever speaking."