Ganges, should have looked upon life as a perpetual Sunday or holiday,
or a kind of long vacation, delightful so long as it lasts, but which
must come to an end sooner or later? Why should they have accumulated
wealth? why should they have built palaces? why should they have
toiled day and night? After having provided from day to day for the
small necessities of the body, they thought they had the right, it may
be the duty, to look round upon this strange exile, to look inward
upon themselves, upward to something not themselves, and to see
whether they could not understand a little of the true purport of that
mystery which we call life on earth.

Of course _we_ should call such notions of life dreamy, unreal,
unpractical, but may not _they_ look upon our notions of life as
short-sighted, fussy, and, in the end, most unpractical, because
involving a sacrifice of life for the sake of life?

No doubt these are both extreme views, and they have hardly ever been
held or realized in that extreme form by any nation, whether in the
East or in the West. We are not always plodding--we sometimes allow
ourselves an hour of rest and peace and thought--nor were the ancient
people of India always dreaming and meditating on [Greek: ta megista],
on the great problems of life, but, when called upon, we know that they
too could fight like heroes, and that, without machinery, they could by
patient toil raise even the meanest handiwork into a work of art, a real
joy to the maker and to the buyer.

All then that I wish to put clearly before you is this, that the Aryan
man, who had to fulfil his mission in India, might naturally be
deficient in many of the practical and fighting virtues, which were
developed in the Northern Aryans by the very struggle without which
they could not have survived, but that his life on earth had not
therefore been entirely wasted. His very view of life, though we
cannot adopt it in this Northern climate, may yet act as a lesson and
a warning to us, not, for the sake of life, to sacrifice the highest
objects of life.

The greatest conqueror of antiquity stood in silent wonderment before
the Indian Gymnosophists, regretting that he could not communicate
with them in their own language, and that their wisdom could not reach
him except through the contaminating channels of sundry interpreters.

That need not be so at present. Sanskrit is no longer a difficult
language, and I can assure every young Indian civil s