month, in the most friendly way)
to communicate to me your criticisms or doubts or thoughts or corrections
on that which I have touched on in your own especial territory, as I had
expressly and earnestly begged you to do. I have improved the arrangement
very much. As you have not done this, I can only entertain one of two
disagreeable suppositions, namely, that you are either ill or out of
spirits, or that you have only what is disagreeable to say of my book, and
would rather spare yourself and me from this. But as from what I know of
you, and you know of me, I do not find in either the one or the other
supposition a sufficient explanation of your obstinate silence, I should
have forced myself to wait patiently, had I not to beg from you alone a
small but indispensable gift for my "God in History."

I have again in this interregnum taken up the interrupted studies of last
year on the Aryan God-Consciousness in the Asiatic world, and thanks to
Burnouf's, yours, Wilson's, Roth's and Fausboell's books, and Haug's
assistance and translations, I have made the way easy to myself for
understanding the two great Aryan prophets Zaraduschtra and Sakya, and (so
far as that is possible to one of us now) the Veda; and this not without
success and with inexpressible delight. My expectations are far exceeded.
The Vedic songs are by far the most glorious, which in first going through
that fearful translation of Wilson's, seemed to wish to hide themselves
entirely from me. The difficulties of making them intelligible, even of a
bare translation, are immense; the utter perverseness of Saya_n_a is only
exceeded by that of Wilson, to whom however one can never be grateful
enough for his communications. I now first perceive what a difficult but
also noble work you have undertaken, and how much still remains doubtful;
even after one has got beyond the collectors and near to the original
poets. It is as if of the Hebrew traditions we only had the Psalms, and
that without an individual personality like David, without, in fact, any
one; on the contrary, allusions to Abraham's possible poems and the
cosmical dreams of the Aramaeans. But yet how strong is the feeling of
immediate relation to God and nature, how truly human, and how closely
related to our own! What a curious similarity to the Edda, Homer, and
Pindar, Hesiod, and the Hellenic primitive times! Nothing however gave me
greater delight than the dignity and solemnity of the funeral ceremo