rs; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and
kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel
the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were
aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight,
quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;

"They prayed, but their worship was only
The wonder of nights and of days,"

--when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the
poems of the earth was made:--it was song, it was tone, it was
music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was
intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language:
seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps:
and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the
Glory of God. And then--was it like this?--they grew material,
and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit;
and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the
vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving
intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis
with its complex civilization--its infinitely more complex
civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into
being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the
growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing
human brain; and a thousand languages were formed--many of them
to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America--as
much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese:
highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up
and filigreed beyond telling;--and that was at the midmost point
and highest material civilization of Atlantis. And then the
Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the
seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of
the first sub-race;--till you had something in character not
intellectual, but spiritual:--Chinese. And meanwhile--I am
throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second
appears to contradict the first: presently a unity may come of
them;--meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then
nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in
Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,--
but also spiritual: not without tonalistic elements: a thing to
be chanted, and not dully spoken:--and there, when the time came
for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.

But now for the Sixt