grew more boldly speculative but also more sedentary, formal and meticulous.  The earliest hymns bear traces of quasi-nomadic life, but the writers are no longer nomads.  They follow agriculture as well as pasturage, but they are still contending with the aborigines:  still expanding and moving on.  They mention no states or capitals:  they revere rivers and mountains but have no shrines to serve as religious centres, as repositories and factories of tradition.  Legends and precepts have of course come down from earlier generations, but are not very definite or cogent:  the stories of ancient sages and warriors are vague and wanting in individual colour.

2

The absence of sculpture and painting explains much in the character of the Vedic deities.  The hymn-writers were devout and imaginative, not content to revere some undescribed being in the sky, but full of mythology, metaphor and poetry and continually singling out new powers for worship.  Among many races the conceptions thus evolved acquire solidity and permanence by the aid of art.  An image stereotypes a deity, worshippers from other districts can see it and it remains from generation to generation as a conservative and unifying force.  Even a stone may have something of the same effect, for it connects the deity with the events, rites and ideas of a locality.  But the earliest stratum of Vedic religion is worship of the powers of nature—­such as the Sun, the Sky, the Dawn, the Fire—­which are personified but not localized or depicted.  Their attributes do not depend at all on art, not much on local or tribal custom but chiefly on imagination and poetry, and as this poetry was not united in one collection until a later period, a bard was under no obligation to conform to the standards of his fellows and probably many bards sang without knowing of one another’s existence.

Such a figure as Agni or Fire—­if one can call him a figure—­illustrates the fluid and intangible character of Vedic divinities.  He is one of the greatest in the Pantheon, and in some ways his godhead is strongly marked.  He blesses, protects, preserves, and inspires:  he is a divine priest and messenger between gods and men:  he “knows all generations.”  Yet we cannot give any definite account of him such as could be drawn up for a Greek deity.  He is not a god of fire, like Vulcan, but the Fire itself regarded as divine.  The descriptions of his appearance are not really anthropomorphic but metaphorical imagery depicting shining, streaming flames.  The hymns tell us that he has a tawny beard and hair:  a flaming head or three heads:  three tongues or seven:  four eyes or a thousand.  One poem says that he faces in all directions:  another that he is footless and headless.  He is called the son of Heaven and Earth, of Tvashtri and the Waters, of the Dawn, of Indra-Vishnu.  One singer says that the gods generated him to be a light for the Aryans, another that he is the father of the gods.  This