78
and religions. Butmaking an allowance for this their inheriting the common colour of the whole nation, we cannot help feeling that they are people “who love, who feel great truths, and tell them”—if by “great” truths we mean truths greater than those which the poets found understood by their countrymen. The mission which poets and philosophers feel within their heart, is to take their countrymen a step. forward,—a step in the line of progress and not a leap from one age to an- other. Or, as a poet has said of his fellows, “they givé us nobler loves and nobler cares,” not noblest loves and noblest cares, which latter no one, with any pretension to philosophic freedom from conceit, can ever predicate of any present thing in this age of progressive expecta- tions. And, judging by this standard, what native of Gujarat will not say that his poets have not made a gift of higher loves and cares to his countrymen? There may be higher and nobler things present in the world surrounding us, or in prospect, in the coming age, than what these poets have taught ; and if they are so present or so in prospect, we shall have them and shall rise to them. But the fact remains that these poets took their society at least a step higher than where it would have been without them. But for these poets the people of Gujarat would have long since been turned into decayed and shrunken things; and if there is life leftin them, the life-drops have been supplied by the poets. The poets
