ong
originality and genius.

There is, however, one period of Sanskrit literature which forms an
exception, and which will maintain its place in the history of
mankind, when the name of Kalidasa and _S_akuntala will have been long
forgotten. It is the most ancient period, the period of the Veda.
There is, perhaps, a higher degree of interest attaching to works of
higher antiquity; but in the Veda we have more than mere antiquity. We
have ancient thought expressed in ancient language. Without insisting
on the fact that even chronologically the Veda is the first book of
the Aryan nations, we have in it, at all events, a period in the
intellectual life of man to which there is no parallel in any other
part of the world. In the hymns of the Veda we see man left to himself
to solve the riddle of this world. We see him crawling on like a
creature of the earth with all the desires and weaknesses of his
animal nature. Food, wealth, and power, a large family and a long
life, are the theme of his daily prayers. But he begins to lift up his
eyes. He stares at the tent of heaven, and asks who supports it? He
opens his ears to the winds, and asks them whence and whither? He is
awakened from darkness and slumber by the light of the sun, and him
whom his eyes cannot behold, and who seems to grant him the daily
pittance of his existence, he calls 'his life, his breath, his
brilliant Lord and Protector.' He gives names to all the powers of
nature, and after he has called the fire Agni, the sun-light Indra,
the storms Maruts, and the dawn Ushas, they all seem to grow naturally
into beings like himself, nay, greater than himself. He invokes them,
he praises them, he worships them. But still with all these gods
around him, beneath him, and above him, the early poet seems ill at
rest within himself. There too, in his own breast, he has discovered a
power that wants a name, a power nearer to him than all the gods of
nature, a power that is never mute when he prays, never absent when he
fears and trembles. It seems to inspire his prayers, and yet to
listen to them; it seems to live in him, and yet to support him and
all around him. The only name he can find for this mysterious power is
Brahman; for brahman meant originally force, will, wish, and the
propulsive power of creation. But this impersonal brahman, too, as
soon as it is named, grows into something strange and divine. It ends
by being one of many gods, one of the great triad, worship