with the Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians, Celts, Etruscans, and even with the Peruvians of the other hemisphere.[1]
If one listens to the discourse of those who have been much inclined to study the savant language of the Indians, Sanskrit, he will be persuaded that it is the most perfect language that man has ever spoken. Nothing, according to them, can surpass its riches, its fertility, its admirable structure; it is the source of the most poetic conceptions and the mother of all the dialects which are in use from the Persian Gulf to the waters of China.[2] It is certain that if anything can prove to the eyes of savants the maternal rights that this tongue claims over all the others, it is the astonishing variety of its poetry: what other peoples possess in detail, it possesses in toto. It is there that Eumolpœia, Epopœia, and Dramatic Art shine with native éclat: it is there that poetry divine and rational, poetry allegorical and passionate, poetry stirring and even romantic, find their cradle. There, all forms are admitted, all kinds of verse received. The Vedas, pre-eminently sacred books, are, like the Koran of Mohammed, written in cadenced prose.[3] The Pouranas, which contain the theosophy and philosophy of the Brahmans, their system concerning Nature, their ideas upon morals and upon natural philosophy, are composed in philosophical verse not rhymed; they are attributed to Vyasa, the Orpheus of the Indians. Valmiki, who is their Homer, has displayed in the Ramayana an epopœia magnificent and sublime to the highest degree; the dramas, which they call Nataks, are, according to their style, rhymed and not rhymed: Bheret is considered as their inventor; Kalidasa as their perfecter.[4] The other kinds of poetry are all
- ↑ William Jones, Asiatic Researches, vol. i., p. 430.
- ↑ Wilkin's Notes on the Hitopadesa, p. 249. Halled's Grammar, in the preface. The same, Code of the Gentoo-Laws. Asiat. Research., vol. i., p. 423.
- ↑ Asiat. Research., vol. i., p. 346. Also in same work, vol. i., p. 430.
- ↑ W. Jones has put into English a Natak entitled Sakuntala or The Fatal Ring, of which the French translation has been made by Brugnières. Paris, 1803, chez Treuttel et Würtz.
