7.
Black darkness came, yet bright with stars,
It came to us, with brilliant hues;
Dawn, free us as from heavy debt!
8.
Like cows, I brought this hymn to thee,
As to a conqueror, child of Dyaus,
Accept it graciously, O Night!
We must remember that the night to the Vedic poet was not the same as darkness, but that on the contrary, when the night had driven away the day, she was supposed to lighten the darkness, and even to rival her sister, the bright day, with her starlight beauty. The night, no doubt, gives peace and rest, yet the Dawn is looked upon as the kindlier light, and is implored to free mortals from the dangers of the night, as debtors are freed from a debt. Many conjectural alterations have been proposed in this hymn, but it seems to me to be intelligible even as it stands.
One more hymn to show how the belief in and the worship of these physical gods, the actors behind the phenomena of nature, could grow naturally into a belief in and a worship of moral powers, endowed with all the qualities essential to divine beings. Moral ideas are not so entirely absent from the Veda, as has sometimes been asserted, and nothing can be more instructive than to watch the process by which they spring naturally from a belief in the gods of nature. I give the hymn to Varuna from Rig-Veda VII, 86, which I translated for the first time in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature” in the year 1859, and which, with the help of other translations published in the meantime, I have now tried to improve and to clothe in the metrical form of the original.