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times was extended in fact only to the strong Powers, while the more passive divinities, although they were kept as a matter of form in the ceremonial, yet had in reality only tongue-worshippers.
With some few exceptions, however, it will be found impossible to say whether any one deity belonged to the first pantheon.
The best one can do is to separate the mass of gods from those that become the popular gods, and endeavor to learn what was the character of each, and what were the conceptions of the poets in regard both to his nature, and to his relations with man. A different grouping of the gods (that indicated below) will be followed, therefore, in our exposition.
After what has been said in the introductory chapter concerning the necessity of distinguishing between good and bad poetry, it may be regarded as incumbent upon us to seek to make such a division of the hymns as shall illustrate our words. But we shall not attempt to do this here, because the distinction between late mechanical and poetic hymns is either very evident, and it would be superfluous to burden the pages with the trash contained in the former, [1] or the distinction is one liable to reversion at the hands of those critics whose judgment differs from ours, for there are of course some hymns that to one may seem poetical and to another, artificial. Moreover, we admit that hymns of true feeling may be composed late as well as early, while as to beauty of style the chances are that the best literary production will be found among the latest rather than among the earliest hymns.
It would, indeed, be admissible, if one had any certainty in regard to the age of the different parts of the Rig Veda, simply to divide the hymns into early, middle, and late, as they are sometimes divided in philological works, but here one rests on the weakest of all supports for historical judgment, a linguistic and metrical basis, when one is ignorant alike of what may have been accomplished by imitation, and of the work of those later priests who remade the poems of their ancestors.
