THE ANGLO-SAXON AND THE HINDU
"Quis novus hic nostris successit
sedibus hospes!"
Lecture I
The fair queen of Carthage, captivated by the manly beauty of the heroic son of Aphrodites, asked her sister Anna—"Who is this stranger that has come to our dwelling?" In her widowed heart—hitherto a vacant temple—she found the image of this man mysteriously enshrined; and it was thus that her adoring yet wondering soul hymned forth its deep, its impassioned, its fervent devotion—"Who is the stranger that has come to our dwelling?"
Now—though I cannot conscientiously say that the Anglo-Saxon stranger has created in the bosom of this magnificent land of the sun, this queenly Hindustan—that profound, that fervent, that all-absorbing feeling of love, which immolated the hapless Dido on the blazing pyre, and sent her to the hades, an unblest, a melancholy ghost—yet well may she ask—well may this queenly Hindustan—ask in the language of the love-sick Phoenician—"Who is this stranger that has come to our dwelling? Well methinks, may she ask—who is this fair-haired stranger that has come to our shores? Who is this stranger that has in the course of a solitary century reared among us a fabric of power the most wonderous and glorious? Who is the stranger that is lord of our sunny fields, of our shady groves, of our woody hills, of our wells of crystals water, of our mossy fountains, of our bowers of roses? Who is this stranger, for whom the most radiant diamonds are sought from the sunless depths of our mines; for whom the gold and silver, hidden in our treasure-caves, are brought forth to blush in the light of the sun? Who is this stranger that has bound us, as it were, with chains of adamant, and whose bright sword gleams before our eyes like a fiery meteor—terrifying us into submission and humbling us to the dust? "Who is this stranger that has come to our dwelling?"—Well, methinks may she ask and wonder!
For look around you. From where the silvery waves kiss the brow of the virgin Bride[1]—to where the stupendous Himalayas rise in airy grandeur, with summits untrod, but by the shadow of the Deity—from the deep—blue Bay, to which the greenest and palmiest of countries give its name[2]—to the mighty Indus, look around you. Empires and kingdoms, such as would have gratified the boundless ambition of that earth-born Titan—Napoleon the grand; rich
