of the fables of all countries.

The dramas of Kalidasa, the Hindu Shakespeare, contain many episodes
borrowed from the great Epic poems. The Messenger Cloud of this poet is
not surpassed by any European writer of verse. The Ramayon and the
Mahabharata are the two great Epic poems of India, and they exceed in
conception and magnitude any of the Epic poems in the world, surpassing
the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Jerusalem Delivered. The Ramayon, of
seven Cantos, has twenty-five thousand verses, and the hero, Rama, in
his wanderings and misfortunes, is not unlike Ulysses. The Mahabharata
records the doings of gods, giants, and heroes, who are all fighting
against each other. It contains two hundred thousand verses, embodied
in eighteen Cantos, and is thought to be not the work of one man; but
different songs sung from the earliest ages by the people, and
gradually blended into one poem. In it we find the ancient traditions
which nearly all people possess, of a more free, active and primitive
state of nature, whose world of greatness and heroism has been
suppressed in later ages. Among the Hindustans there exists a religion
resembling in part that of Greece, with traces of the Egyptian; and yet
containing in itself many ideas, both moral and philosophical, which in
spite of dissimilarity in detail, is evidently akin to our doctrines of
the Christian religion. In fact, the resemblance between the Hindu and
Christian religion is so remarkable that some scholars think the Hindu
was taken from the Christian. It is more probable that it was of
greater antiquity, and that the similarity between them springs from
the seed of all truth and all Nature implanted in man by God. Indian
and Christian both teach regeneration. In the Indian creed, as soon as
the soul is touched with the love of divine things it is supposed to
drop its life of sin and become "new born."

In a higher region all these truths in the lower world which have to do
with divine things, are mysteriously akin to each other. It needs only
the first spark of light from above to make them instinct with life.

The Recluses or Gymnosophists of India are not unlike the first
Recluses of Egypt, and the first hermits of the desert in the Christian
era.

The doctrines of India first obtained a foothold in Europe through the
dogma of Metempsychosis. It was introduced into the Hellenes by
Pythagoras; but never became popular among the Greeks. This
Metempsychosis (or the t