devoted industry of Benfey, Muir, Max Müller, and others, has placed more than a sufficient number of them within reach of the general public to enable us all to judge of their literary value and their religious teaching. With regard to the former, it would be difficult to concede to them anything but a very modest place. In beauty of style, expression, or ideas, they appear to me to be almost totally deficient. Assuming, as we are entitled to do, that all the best specimens have been already culled by scholars eager to find something attractive in the Veda, it must be confessed that the general run of the hymns is singularly monotonous, and their language by no means conspicuous for poetical coloring. No doubt, poetry always loses in translation; but Isaiah and Homer are still beautiful in a German or English dress; the Sûktas of the Rig-Veda are not. A few exceptions no doubt occur, as in the stanzas to Ushas, or Dawn, quoted above, but the ordinary level is not a high one.
Although, however, the literary merit of the Veda cannot be ranked high, its value to the religious history of humanity at large, and of our race in particular, can hardly be overrated. To the comparative mythologist, above all, it possesses illimitable interest, from the new light it sheds upon the origin and significance of many of those world-wide tales which, in their metamorphosed Hellenic shape, could not be effectually brought under the process of dissection by which their primitive elements have now been laid bare. Mythology is beyond the province of this work, and therefore I purposely refrain from entering upon any explanation of the physical meaning of the old Aryan gods, or of the stories in which they figure.[1] All that I have to do with here is the grade attained in the development of religious feeling among those who worshiped them. And this, it is plain, was at first a very elementary one. The more striking phenomena of nature—the sun, the moon, the sky, the storms, the dawn, the fire—at first attracted their attention, and absorbed their adoration. To these personal beings, as they seemed to the awe-struck Rishis, petitions of the rudest type were confidently addressed. Very little allusion, if any, was made to the necessities of the moral nature; the
- ↑ All this will be found admirably treated in Mr. Cox's "Mythology of the Aryan Nations."
