Among the untaught peasantry of Sicily, the sweet story goes that "Mary sends an angel from Heaven one day every week to play with the souls of the unbaptized children [in hell]; and when he goes away, he takes with him, in a golden chalice, all the tears which the little innocents have shed all through the week, and pours them into the sea, where they become pearls" (449. 326).
Here again we have a borrowing from an older myth. An Eastern legend has it that when Eden was lost, Eve, the mother of all men, wept bitterly, and "her tears, which flowed into the ocean, were changed into costly pearls, while those which fell on the earth brought forth all beautiful flowers" (547. 34). In the classic myth, the pearl is said to have been born of the tears of Venus, just as a Greek legend makes ælektron come from the tears of the sisters of Phaëthon, the daughters of the sun, and Teutonic story turns the tears of the goddess Freyja into drops of gold (462. III. 1218).
In the Kalevala we read how, after the wonderful harping of Wäinämöinen, the great Finnish hero, which enchanted beasts, birds, and even fishes, was over, the musician shed tears of gratitude, and these, trickling down his body and through his many garments, were transmuted into pearls of the sea.
Shakespeare, in King Henry V., makes Exeter say to the King,—
"But all my mother came into mine eyes,
And gave me up to tears,"—
and the tears of the mother-god figures in the folk-lore of many lands. The vervain, or verbena, was known as the "Tears of Isis," as well as the "Tears of Juno,"—a name given also to an East Indian grass (Coix lacryma). The lily of the valley, in various parts of Europe, is called "The Virgin's Tears," "Tears of Our Lady," "Tears of St. Mary." Zmigrodzki notes the following belief as current in Germany: "If the mother weeps too much, her dead child comes to her at night, naked and trembling, with its little shirt in its hand, and says: 'Ah, dearest mother, do not weep! See! I have no rest in the grave; I cannot put on my little shirt, it is all wet with your tears.'" In Cracow, the common saying is, "God forbid that the tears of the mother should fall upon the corpse of her child." In Brittany the folk-belief is that "the dead child has to carry water up a hill in a little bucket, and the tears of the mother increase its weight" (174. 141).
The Greeks fabled Eos, the dawn-goddess, to have been so disconsolate at the death of Memnon, her son, that she wept for him every morning, and her tears are the dewdrops found upon the earth. In the mythology of the Samoans of the Pacific, the Heaven-god, father of all things, and the Earth-goddess, mother of all things, once held each other in firm embrace, but were separated in the long ago. Heaven, however, retains his love for earth, and, mourning for her through the long nights, he drops many tears upon her bosom,—these, men call dewdrops. The natives of Tahiti have a like explanation for the thick-falling rain-drops that dimple the surface of the ocean, heralding an approaching storm,—they are tears of the heaven-god. The saying is:—
"Thickly falls the small rain on the face of the sea,
They are not drops of rain, but they are tears of Oro."
(Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, p. 334.)
An Indian tribe of California believe that "the rain is the falling tears of Indians sick in heaven," and they say that it was "the tears of all mankind, weeping for the loss of a good young Indian," that caused the deluge, in which all were drowned save a single couple (440. 488).
Oriental legend relates, that, in his utter loneliness after the expulsion from Paradise, "Adam shed such an abundance of tears that all beasts and birds satisfied their thirst therewith; but some of them sunk into the earth, and, as they still contained some of the juices of his food in Paradise, produced the most fragrant trees and spices." We are further told that "the tears flowed at last in such torrents from Adam's eyes, that those of his right started the Euphrates, while those of his left set the Tigris in motion" (547. 34).