that is, to say, dispersed; composed of families detached from each
other; of wandering, hordes; these were collected together, approximated
at the voice of some missionary or legislator, from whom they received
great benefits, who gave them gods, opinions, and laws. These
personages, of whom the people newly congregated readily acknowledged
the superiority, fixed the national gods, leaving to each individual,
those which he had formed to himself, according to his own peculiar
ideas, or else substituting others brought from those regions, from
whence they themselves had emigrated.

The better to imprint their lessons on the minds of their new subjects,
these men became the guides, the priests, the sovereigns, the masters of
these infant societies; they formed discourses by which they spoke to
the imagination of their willing auditors. POETRY seem best adapted to
strike the mind of these rude people, to engrave on their memory those
ideas with which they were willing to imbue them: its images, its
fictions, its numbers, its rhyme its harmony, all conspired to please
their fancy, to render permanent the, impressions it made: thus, the
entire of nature, as well as all its parts, was personified, by its
beautiful allegories: at its soothing voice, trees, stones, rocks,
earth, air, fire, water, by imagination took intelligence, held
conversation with man, and with themselves; the elements were deified by
its songs, every thing was figuratively detailed in harmonious lays. The
sky, which according to the then philosophy, was an arched concave,
spreading over the earth, which was supposed to be a level plain; (for
the doctrine of _antipodes_ is of rather modern date) was itself made a
god; was considered a more suitable residence, as making a greater
distinction for these imaginary deities than the earth on which man
himself resided. Thus the firmament was filled with deities.