Wentworth Webster
Basque Legends; With an Essay on the Basque Language
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664637550
Table of Contents
The Three Brothers, the Cruel Master, and the Tartaro.
The Tartaro and Petit Perroquet.
II—The Heren-Suge.—The Seven-Headed Serpent.
The Grateful Tartaro and the Heren-Suge.
IV.—Basa-Jaun, Basa-Andre, and Lamiñak.
The Witch and the New-Born Infant.
(B.) — Contes des Fées , derived directly from the French.
Jesus Christ and the Old Soldier.
The Poor Soldier and the Rich Man.
The Story of the Hair-Cloth Shirt (La Cilice) .
The Slandered and Despised Young Girl.
An Essay on the Basque Language,
Introduction.
The study of the recent science of Comparative Mythology is one of the most popular and attractive of minor scientific pursuits. It deals with a subject-matter which has interested most of us at one period of our lives, and turns the delight of our childhood into a charm and recreation for maturer age. Nor is it without more useful lessons. In it we see more clearly than perhaps elsewhere the reciprocal influence, which none can wholly escape, of words and language upon thought, and again of thought and fancy upon words and language; how mere words and syllables may modify both conception and belief; how the metaphor, which at first presented an object more clearly and vividly to the mind than any more direct form of speech could do, soon confuses and at last wholly distorts the original idea, and buries its meaning under a new and foreign superstructure. We may mark here, too, by numerous examples, how slowly the human mind rises to the conception of any abstract truth, and how continually it falls back upon the concrete fact which it is compelled to picture to itself in order to state in words the simplest mental abstraction. The phrase, “The dawn flies before the sun,” passing into the myth of Daphne