the
Banyan--_In die weite weite Welt hinaus_--out into the wild, brave
world! Some went Greekward. There is a curious book, by an English
scholar, attempting to prove that the names of hill and valley, mountain
and seas, in Greece, and of the countries which lead eastward to it, are
all those of India but little changed. A problem awaiting the scientific
accuracy of a Max Muller or a Grimm, and not to be handily tossed into
shape by a poetic _Faber_, or guessed at by a wild-Irish O'Brien or
Vallancey, or a lunatic Betham. It is, however, worth noting that over
those South Slavonian provinces, _via_ Greece, flowed for many centuries
northward a strangely silent stream of Orientalism, but little disturbed
by the outer or upper currents of history. He who has dabbled in
Servian-Croat-Illyrian--twin sister to Bohemian--has doubtless been
amazed at the wealth of Sanscrit words it contains, albeit he may not go
so far as Pococke, who asserts that with Sanscrit alone one may travel
in those countries and be understood. Over this path it was, however,
even down to the middle ages, that a rich store of Oriental heresies and
forbidden lore flowed into freemasonry, into Waldense and Albigense
sects, into many a hidden doctrine and strange brotherhood now
forgotten or veiled under some horrible outbreaking of stifling passion
and terrible ante-Protestantism. Over this path, on which, in earlier
ages, the mitre and rosary and violet robe and confessional, and
doctrines of celibacy and monkery and nun-nism, and bell and consecrated
taper, and still deeper dogmas or doctrines, wandered from the East into
the Church, came also heresies, terrible as Knights Templars', which in
due time warred against the Church, and cleft it in twain. The doctrines
of wild sects, more or less Manichaean, which came forth strangely to
upper life during the fever of the Crusades, all seem to tend obscurely
from a Slavonic source. The vices with their adepti were reproached by
the Church, gave to most of the languages of Europe a revolting word,
modified from the name 'Bulgarian.' The origin of the earlier Bohemian
Hussite sects, with their strange devil-worship and doctrine of
transmigration, was manifestly Oriental. At a later date the very name
of the mystic Jacob Boehme--Jacob the Bohemian--indicates some secret
alliance with Slavonian associations; and if the connection of the name
with strange Oriental speculations be obscure, that of the teachings of