still his scholastic notions would never
allow him to accept the free interpretation which a comparative study
of these venerable documents forces upon the unprejudiced scholar. We
must therefore discover ourselves the real vestiges of these ancient
poets; and if we follow them cautiously, we shall find that with some
effort we are still able to walk in their footsteps. We shall feel
that we are brought face to face and mind to mind with men yet
intelligible to us, after we have freed ourselves from our modern
conceits. We shall not succeed always: words, verses, nay, whole hymns
in the Rig-veda, will and must remain to us a dead letter. But where
we can inspire those early relics of thought and devotion with new
life, we shall have before us more real antiquity than in all the
inscriptions of Egypt or Nineveh; not only old names and dates, and
kingdoms and battles, but old thoughts, old hopes, old faith, and old
errors, the old Man altogether--old now, but then young and fresh, and
simple and real in his prayers and in his praises.

The thoughtful bent of the Hindu mind is visible in the Veda also, but
his mystic tendencies are not yet so fully developed. Of philosophy we
find but little, and what we find is still in its germ. The active
side of life is more prominent, and we meet occasionally with wars of
kings, with rivalries of ministers, with triumphs and defeats, with
war-songs and imprecations. Moral sentiments and worldly wisdom are
not yet absorbed by phantastic intuitions. Still the child betrays the
passions of the man, and there are hymns, though few in number, in the
Veda, so full of thought and speculation that at this early period no
poet in any other nation could have conceived them. I give but one
specimen, the 129th hymn of the tenth book of the Rig-veda. It is a
hymn which long ago attracted the attention of that eminent scholar H.
T. Colebrooke, and of which, by the kind assistance of a friend, I am
enabled to offer a metrical translation. In judging it we should bear
in mind that it was not written by a gnostic or by a pantheistic
philosopher, but by a poet who felt all these doubts and problems as
his own, without any wish to convince or to startle, only uttering
what had been weighing on his mind, just as later poets would sing the
doubts and sorrows of their heart.

Nor Aught nor Nought existed; yon bright sky
Was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above.
What covered all? w